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Putin says, fight!
and they fight
for some stupid reason
and die
by the tens of thousands
without knowing why.
I don't get it.
So many of them
and only one of him.
He plucks them
from the masses
one by one
like gnats
off an ox's ass
yoked and dumb.
Maybe it's the money,
he's got more of it
than all of them combined
owns a $500 million
6-story super yacht
called Scheherazade
and they don't even realize
it's their money
bamboozled
LOL.
I'm still reeling from the disgraceful 'emergency' UN General Assembly vote demanding an immediate 'humanitarian' ceasefire in Gaza, a resolution supported by Canada, along with other paragons of international 'humanitarian' conduct and concern Russia and Iran. In a rare move, Canada broke with the United States, one of only 10 countries having the guts (moral clarity) to dissent.
I've always been a supporter of the UN. I have argued to anyone who would listen that no organization in human history has done more good for humanity than the UN. And we need it to work more than ever. From nuclear weapons and climate change, to trade and worldwide pandemics, our problems are global and the future of humanity has never been more interdependent. Nations will either cooperate internationally to solve these problems within a stable and orderly system of discussion, negotiation and cooperation according to conventions, norms and values such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or we will let the chips of conflict and chaos fall where they may, at our peril. The UN should (and I believe could still) offer our best hope for a safe and secure future. It has been relatively successful since the end of World War 2 on many accounts, ushering in an era of unprecedented global peace and prosperity. This doesn't mean there hasn't been international conflict and crises - that's guaranteed - which is precisely why we need a functioning UN. But as we've seen in the past few years, especially during our recent once-in-hundred-year pandemic, the UN's record has been a pretty dismal failure in several respects.
Perhaps the worst of it, consistently so, has been its longstanding deplorable record on Israel. It's as if the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, when the UN played an important role specifically with Resolution 181 the so-called Partition Plan, is the organization's dirty little secret, an episode from its past for which it carries deep regret and shame, and would bury or reverse, if it could. The irony is that in helping to midwife the State of Israel out of the ashes of the Holocaust, Israel should represent a laudatory achievement of the UN. The realization of its universal humanitarian goals based on a consensus-building approach (72% of members voted in favour of Resolution 181, more than the required two-thirds). Instead, the UN has acted to undermine Israel's sovereignty continuously, not in spite of the way it came into existence, but seemingly because of it. Israel is like the pebble in the UN's shoe. The annoying emblem of everything wrong with the way the UN works (or rather doesn't work). The failure of the UN to accept Israel - and by 'accept' I mean simply to apply to Israel the standards it applies to all other member states, the foundational principle on which the UN exists, namely Article 2 of the Charter which calls on all members to equally respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of other states - has been a primary reason for the perpetuation of conflict in the region.
The original sin of Israel is that it won a War of Independence. Palestinian Jews didn't want a war. They accepted the Partition Plan promoted by the UN. The Palestinian Arabs didn't. Israel declared its Independence and the Arabs responded by attacking it, which contravenes the UN Charter. The war resulted in the nascent State of Israel successfully establishing its Independence and also in approximately 750,000 Arabs becoming displaced, which is unfortunately not an unusual consequence of war. What is unusual, however, is that the UN felt it was responsible for what happened, so it created an agency devoted to the Palestinian Arab refugees called UNRWA (The UN Relief and Works Agency), separate from the UNHCR (The High Commission for Refugees) the agency that addresses the needs of all other refugees around the world. In addition to having their own permanent exclusive agency, Palestinians are unique in that they are the only refugees in the world who pass down their status as international refugees from generation to generation. As a result, the original 750,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war has now grown to approximately 6 million refugees. According to UNRWA's website nearly one-third of the registered Palestinian refugees, more than 1.5 million individuals, live in 58 recognized refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. From their own website: "Socioeconomic conditions in the camps are generally poor, with high population density, cramped living conditions and inadequate basic infrastructure such as roads and sewers." It's not terribly surprising that the Palestinian refugee camps have become the principle breeding grounds for hatred, resentment, and radical political and religious ideologies, as well as factories for the creation and recruitment of terrorist organizations.
You might ask, what was the alternative? What else could the Palestinians who were displaced do after the 1948 war with Israel? Well, what happens to any other group of people who are displaced as a result of war (and not necessarily one they started)? They are typically absorbed by other countries. For example, before the founding of Israel, millions and millions of Jewish refugees fled war and persecution in Europe for decades and were eventually absorbed by other countries all over the world (after also being rejected by many countries). In fact, Palestinian Arabs could have been absorbed by Israel, and 160,000 of them were. Today, approximately 1.6 million 'Palestinian' Arabs are now citizens of Israel, roughly 20% of the country's total population. UNRWA is literally an artificial life-support system for people in limbo. People who exist outside, and in the case of Israel, in opposition to, the UN's own stated purpose to ensure the territorial integrity of sovereign member states. It's a system that legitimizes Palestinian claims at the expense of Israel, a member state.
How unique is the case of the Palestinians with respect to Israel? In a word: Singular. Palestine is not a member of the UN but it has non-member observer status. It can make speeches but cannot vote. It is the only 'political' group with such status. The other non-member observer at the UN is the Vatican (called the Holy See). The natural question is, why haven't the Palestinians declared statehood just as Israel did? The answer: They did, on the 15th of November 1988, a state comprised of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. But at the time it did not exercise control over any territory. That changed with the negotiations of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Palestinian representatives recognised Israel's right to exist, and Israel recognised the PLO as representative of the Palestinian people, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) was established to govern their territory. The State of Palestine has already been recognized by 139 of the 193 UN members. The two-state solution de facto exists right now which means Palestinians in Gaza are not refugees, they've just been subject to dysfunctional (and outlaw) governance since Hamas took over in 2006. UNRWA should be dissolved immediately as a step toward peace.
I truly didn't want to continue making these posts, but it seems I can't help myself, the world being where it is, and the situation always developing, or rather deteriorating. We live in a world in which a lot is said publicly about everything, there are already too many words spewed liberally, imprecisely and often intentionally to obscure, confuse and sow distrust by muddying the waters. How is adding more words going to help? I ask myself. Maybe if those words are intended to remind us to take a step back to sort out the confusion. To think not of words but to focus on actions and their consequences to help us reflect on where we actually stand in a moral sense. For example, consider:
If you were a Jew who supported Donald Trump, you stood with a President (and party) who presided over the worst massacre of Jews on American soil in its history (the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting).
Or how about, if you were a Jew who supported Netanyahu, you stood with a Prime Minister (and party) who presided over the worst massacre of Jews on Israeli soil in its history (October 7th).
One may wonder if these facts are connected.
Sometimes words do match actions, and we just haven't been paying enough attention. For instance, since 2005 when Israel abandoned Gaza, Hamas has continually and regularly attacked Israel with rockets. These were all unprovoked attacks. October 7th was only the culmination of an ongoing gradual process. You might argue that the Israeli blockade of Gaza was a kind of provocation because it made life 'unlivable' for Palestinians. The facts demonstrate otherwise. The blockade was ineffective in the only way it was meant to be effective, stopping Hamas from building its war machine and network of tunnels. While there was a blockade Hamas's leadership got rich on stolen public funds, and built a formidable infrastructure to wage war against Israel. Also, consider that there is at least one Gaza border that Israel had no control over, with Egypt. The life of Palestinians in Gaza was made 'unlivable' not by Israel, but by Hamas, because Hamas was devoted not to the wellbeing of Palestinians but to their stated mission and purpose, to destroy Israel and kill Israelis.
And then there is the case of where the UN actually stands, despite its pronouncements. The UNRWA is either wittingly or unwittingly complicit in Hamas atrocities. Its schools, hospitals and shelters have been used by Hamas terrorists to attack Israel and shelter militants. It needs to be dismantled and the effort to support Palestinians as generational refugees needs to end. In an unprecedented way, no other agency is more responsible for turning the Palestinian people into international parasites, and for maintaining that status quo for generations. Their lot has never improved since 1948, only deteriorated.
In a rare move, the UN Director General evoked a special article to demand an emergency vote in the Security Council and the General Assembly (GA) on an immediate 'humanitarian' ceasefire in Gaza. The US vetoed the resolution in the Security Council. But this will be the first time in history that the GA will vote in favour of one of its member states standing down from defending its sovereignty after being attacked by a non-state terrorist actor, essentially siding with terrorists.
Words matter. And actions matter more in the final analysis.
Unbelievably, yesterday we learned from the presidents of three of the most prestigious Ivy League universities in the US that calling for the 'genocide of Jews' does not violate their school's code of conduct. I'm referring to the testimony given to House Committee on Education and the Workforce by Harvard president Claudine Gay, University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, and MIT president Sally Kornbluth. Specifically, when asked a direct question, the presidents hedged, answering that unless it was directed at an individual, or it was acted upon, a call for 'genocide' would not constitute a violation of rules of conduct. Magill and Gay called it "a context dependent decision." Calling for the genocide of Jews needs 'context'? Seriously?! One can only wonder what 'context' would make it acceptable. Or better, it has to be acted upon. Genocide? And we wonder why antisemitism on university campuses has exploded virtually unchecked, especially since October 7th. The university presidents demonstrated the mechanism through which antisemitism has been mainstreamed as a kind of moral relativity and obtuseness promoted by the academic institutions that we rely on to educate the next generation of supposed leaders. It's a shameful abdication of responsibility. It might also have something to do with recent reports of American universities receiving $billions from Arab governments. Tracking the ways in which this money has influenced the decisions made by academic institutions is certainly worth pursuing.
I didn't think I'd have more to say about this, and then, sure as snow in winter, I got a message from my daughter who is in university (graduating this month thank god, it's not soon enough.) Among other things, she wrote that she felt ashamed of being Jewish and her unwanted association with a 'genocide' being perpetrated in Gaza. She even used the term 'holocaust' to describe it, saying that the Jews were doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis had done to them. I realized quickly that there was no point in trying to correct my daughter's misconceptions. She was not receptive. I did however try to answer her, in a way that would keep the channels of communication open. I tiptoed around the issues of what actually constitutes a 'holocaust' and 'genocide'. I wrote, "What concerns me most is when taking a viewpoint about an issue, which everyone is entitled to do, that it can become so emotionally charged when others disagree, that it changes the way you see others to the point of demonizing them. You start seeing them as morally deficient, even as an enemy. Demonizing people who disagree with you is one of the biggest problems we face in my view. It's the source of intolerance that tears families apart, and even nations, and leads to autocracy and fascism." Our exchange felt like my daughter and I were sleepwalking, arms locked, into a house on fire and we would both be consumed in flames. That's what happened. After some increasingly heated exchanges, she wrote that I lacked 'moral goodness' in her eyes, and she doesn't want to 'associate herself' with people like that (meaning me).
My daughter clearly has a lot emotionally invested in her opinion. And that's the crux of my greatest fear. For a while I've been trying to pinpoint exactly when rational discussion and healthy debate became replaced with feelings of offense and being personally threatened? I figure it relates to the lens through which most subjects of a liberal education have been taught in our higher education institutions for several decades; as a function of the way the powerful dominate the powerless, the oppressor oppresses the oppressed. Our 'white privilege' (read: victimizer) is to blame, which relates to the ascendancy of identity politics in all its forms, religious, racial, gender etc., and the inherent moral righteousness of minority groups by virtue of their victimization.
But I've also thought that there must be something else to it. An ingredient in some people that makes questions of politics emotionally charged in the extreme and overly personal. People like Gabor Maté, himself a child-survivor of the Holocaust, in whom their politics merges with their personal trauma and shame. These people seem to have a grandiose sense of self (probably related to an inherit insecurity), so that their opinions about politics become a matter of moral rectitude, and opposing viewpoints aren’t debatable on the merits, but rather represent an affront and are reprehensible and need to be scorned. To them it's not a question of policy, of political right and left, but a matter of moral right and wrong. To acknowledge an opposing perspective is tantamount to being personally invalidated.
I don't think I'm imagining it, but there was a time when a difference of opinion was just that. You could agree to disagree, let bygones be bygones, and do it over drinks. I know the informational siloing of social media also plays a part in the breakdown of civil discourse. Not to mention the depersonalization of social interaction that attends our contact mediated through screens in more and more domains of everyday life. The net result is that we are becoming emotionally ever more fragile and less resilient as our exposure to difference becomes increasingly filtered. We are hardening like glass, and our democracy is at risk of shattering.
In response to backlash, the presidents of the Ivy League universities have made statements since their debacle before Congress. Liz Magill said that in the moment she was focused on the thorny issue of First Amendment Constitutional free speech rights, and wasn't thinking about how a call for genocide actually meant a call for mass-murder (I paraphrase). When we lose sight of the meaning of a word like 'genocide' - whether it's in the flippant way my daughter used it, on the one hand, or in the way the president of an Ivy League university neglected to consider the obvious because she was intellectually trying to dodge legal and political land mines, on the other - we're all in trouble.
Lately, the extent of the savagery and barbarism that Hamas terrorists inflicted on Israeli women on October 7th has started coming into full light. Fortunately (and unfortunately) we have a lot of it in graphic detail, not just because there were surviving witnesses, but because in many cases the perpetrators filmed and posted their heinously depraved acts on social media with glee and pride. Suffice to say that they involved rape and the worst imaginable forms of mutilation and degradation.
Women were uniquely victimized on October 7th (as well as while they were in captivity), and it's been particularly disappointing, or better, reprehensible, that almost two months after the event not more has been said of this, not even by organizations that supposedly address, defend and promote the rights of women. Some commentators have taken the position that the silence by these women's rights groups is a result of good ole anti-Semitism. For others, it's more of a political issue, namely, that Israeli women are treated differently because to highlight the attrocities they've suffered is like siding with Israel, and for those people that feels like siding with the victimizer. And then it becomes a question of who has suffered more, the Palestinians or the Israelis, and ultimately a numbers game, ie. it must be the Palestinians because so many more of them are being killed compared to the Israelis. There is something undeniably crass and simplistic about reducing any conflict to such morbid calculations. It treats the life of each victim as a commodity, and just as bad, it makes no moral distinction between the acts of the perpetrators.
Women and children hold special status in any conflict because they are the most vulnerable in society, and typically suffer the most during war. The way women (and children) are treated is particularly revealing about the nature of the combatants and what's at stake. For anyone trying to sort out the moral and political issues at the heart of a conflict, it behooves them to pay close attention to the way the respective sides treat women and children. It's a moral litmus test.
War is part of the accepted system of dispute resolution between international parties. It's a mechanism of last resort, when diplomacy and negotiations have failed, but one that we nevertheless acknowledge will occur. As such, we have decided that we at least need to create international norms, conventions and laws to 'govern' war, to keep it within acceptable moral boundaries of engagement. This is why we can refer to 'war crimes' when we talk about acts that fall outside those boundaries. Understandably, the most heinous and objectionable 'war crimes' are ones done to women and children. And of those, the acts that are pre-meditated are the most serious. In this sense, indiscrimate bombing that inadvertently hits a school is a different kind of war crime than the targeted bombing of a school. Likewise, there is a world of difference between the inadvertent death of a woman that was the result a bombing that targeted terrorists, and the vicious rape and mutilation of a woman designed to torture, terrorize and intimidate. The former is a terrible misfortune of war. The latter is an attack on the core values of our civilization not to mention basic human decency. Anyone, but especially a woman, unable or unwilling to grasp this moral distinction, is a special kind of tragedy of the current conflict.
A few words about the passing of Myles Goodwyn the founder, singer, and songwriter of the rock band April Wine. To a Canadian kid in high school in the 1970s with rock n' roll dreams and playing in his first bands, there was no more important Canadian band than April Wine. Unlike Rush of that era, April Wine had hit after hit after hit thanks to constant radio airplay due to CanCon regulations. In Montreal, April Wine was the darling of CHOM-FM. For me, it was their song Oowatanite, unusually for the band, written and sung by the late bassist Jim Clench, that first caught my attention. I can remember how, when the firebell that opens the song came on the radio, my ears jumped up, and then those power chords and growling guitars. There wasn't another Canadian band that sounded so heavy. One summer 7-UP had a promotion where they would print the name of rock band members on the inside bottom of their aluminum soda cans. It was a 'collect them all' sort of thing. I remember being so disappointed every time I'd get a member of the Guess Who because I wanted the guys from April Wine. Oowatanite notwithstanding, in the early 70s they were a four-piece and known for catchy mid-tempo pop songs like Bad Side of the Moon (an Elton John re-make) and You Could Have Been A Lady (unbelievably a song written by British funksters Hot Chocolate). But as the decade went along the band got heavier and heavier until their ultimate shredding three-guitar line-up. After almost a decade of selling oodles of records in Canada, the group finally broke big in the USA (the song that did it was the rock-boogie Roller). It was this line-up (Goodwyn, Lang, Moffatt, Greenway and Mercer) that I saw for the first time in concert at the Montreal Forum. They were riding high on the release of the album Harder Faster that featured ubiquitous top ten radio hits Say Hello and I Like To Rock. I was in grade 10 and in those days going to a concert almost every month. I'd seen all the biggest touring arena acts of the day, and plenty of up and comers too, from Queen and Jethro Tull to The Cars, from Rush to The Police, and not one of them could hold a candle to April Wine in concert. Sure they had the lights, the smoke machine and pyrotecnics, but it was the musicianship, the interplay of guitars trading speedy hot licks, and Jerry Mercer's legendary drum solo that made them the most exciting rock show on the planet. Not enough is said about Myles Goodwyn's singing, and the bands great live harmonies too. Originally formed in Halifax, but based in Montreal, the band was so beloved that every time they played here it was a homecoming, and the love was returned, they came back often. No Canadian band was more popular (except maybe BTO), and for a band that sold some 10 million albums, April Wine never fully got the respect they deserved. They never appealed to art-rock snobs because they had too many radio-hits and many of them were rock ballads. Their songs were generally simple in structure, three or four chords, and the lyrics basic, even as the musicality and musicianship were undeniable. But most of all, they were rock heroes who themselves paid homage to their rock heroes. Which is why the penultimate moment of every April Wine concert was I Like To Rock, probably their most popular song, in the last section leading to the outro, when one guitar plays the riff of the Beatles' Day Tripper, the second guitar plays the riff to the Rolling Stones' (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, and the third guitar weaves in seamlessly the main riff to I Like To Rock. It's a bit of rock cheekiness to be sure, as well as a nod to their inspirations. To my mind it also demonstrates that their music (the hooks of Myles Goodwyn) fit in with some of the greats of rock and roll.
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Hope
with all your heart
but expect
nothing.
If you can't do that
then hope
with all your heart
and expect a lot,
because nothing is sadder
than expecting
crumbs -
crumbs accumulate
like winter:
Life is made
of more life,
your mind contrives
some nonsense
as your heart surmises
its seasons.
To look at the world
and not read it,
that is what I crave most
not just crumbs.
