... ishmael n. daro
August 18th, 2010

The Ground Zero Mosque


In the ongoing controversy about Park51, a proposed Muslim community centre to be built in Manhattan, the strangest part has been everyone’s willingness to continue calling the project the “Ground Zero mosque.” Clearly, framing it as such has been a successful strategy for opponents of the project—demagogues like Newt Gingrich—since it immediately brings to mind the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. Of course, the actual Park51 community centre will not be at the site of the twin towers but two blocks away, where it isn’t even visible from ground zero. In fact, the building Park51 will replace is the old Burlington Coat Factory. Furthermore, although a mosque will be part of the 15-story building, it will also have a performing arts centre, a gym, swimming pool and other public spaces. The board of the project has Jews, Christians and Muslims sitting on it.

If this is the face of an Islamist takeover of the West, then the planners are either incompetent or they are playing such a long-game that they will have finished a complete conversion of the United States to Islam by the year 2150.

Opponents frequently cite that although there is no legal or constitutional reason for Park51 not to be built, it would be deemed “insensitive” for a group of moderate Muslims in America to worship the same god that crazed religious fanatics from different countries prayed to as they rained destruction upon New Yorkers almost ten years ago. Other than opponents being mostly inspired by base bigotry, the claims of “sensitivity” are exactly the sort of political correctness that conservative politicians often decry elsewhere. Who gives a damn if some people are offended? The offense stems from people’s xenophobia and racism—that or they are stupid enough to equate all Muslims with a handful of lunatics who killed thousands of people of all faiths, including fellow Muslims.

The whole debate is mystifying to me as an atheist because this religious centre will be as useful or as dangerous as any other religious centre on the continent, be it church, mosque or temple. All religions do good at some times and peddle complete nonsense and unreason at other times. Yet, the principle of freedom of religion means that people’s spiritual lives are to remain outside of the scope of government or majoritarian lynch mobs. More than two thirds of Americans think the mosque should be moved farther away from the “hallowed ground” of the open sore that is the World Trade Center site. How far would be far enough? If two blocks is too close, would five blocks be acceptable? What about 10, 20, 50 blocks? The distance is ultimately arbitrary because the impulse to block Park51 itself is irrational.

Arch-atheist Sam Harris recently wrote about the mosque for the Daily Beast. He rightly criticizes Islam (and all religions) for their harmfulness and dangers to reason. However, he also writes that “[a]pologists for Islam have even sought to defend their faith from criticism by inventing a psychological disorder known as ‘Islamophobia.’” In this instance, I think he is wrong. Islamophobia is definitely a real condition that many people suffer from; it is no less real than anti-Semitism, which also targets a specific faith. Islamophobia is of course a problem, and political actors fanning its flames for their own advancement are only making it worse. As much as I dislike superstitious beliefs (like the belief in Allah and his prophet Mohammed), when one minority group gets singled out for harassment and discrimination by a majority it is our duty to speak up.

The mosque in Manhattan needs to be built now, because backing down would hand a victory to the worst of the hate-mongers. If this were truly a battle between Islam and the West, then the best way to fight back for the accomplishments of secular democracy would be to allow Park51 to be built. Perhaps various politicians, bureaucrats and interest groups could finally get their act together and raise a shining monument to the victims of the WTC attacks on the site of the twin towers; surely that would be of more comfort than starting a pogrom against Muslims.

And for Allah’s sake, if you must talk about the Muslim community centre, please call it “the Burlington Coat Factory mosque.”

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August 6th, 2010

Man faces 16 years in prison for videotaping the police


Back in May of this year, a Maryland man named Anthony Graber went for a motorcycle ride on the interstate, along with his helmet-mounted camera so he could record the ride. Graber was clearly speeding, for which he deserved a ticket, but when a state trooper caught up with him he wasn’t stopped in the routine way. Instead of asking him to pull over with blaring sirens, a plain-clothes trooper in an unmarked car cut him off in traffic and exited his car brandishing a gun. Graber thought he was going to get shot or robbed of his motorcycle but the trooper belatedly identified himself and issued the speeding ticket.

Graber, who is a Maryland Air National Guard staff sergeant, put his helmet camera’s video of the encounter on YouTube and though the trooper had been rather needlessly aggressive, he thought the matter over. Apparently, the state police disagreed and soon after the video was posted online they charged him for having recorded the encounter — apparently a violation of wiretapping laws — and seized his computers from his home.

As video recording devices become increasingly cheap and embedded in everything from phones to mp3 players, encounters that cast police in a bad light have become common. Police forces in return are fighting back by charging citizens with these dubious wiretapping violations in an effort to, presumably, intimidate people from posting such embarrassing videos for all to see.

Time Magazine reports:

In the case of Graber — a young husband and father who had never been arrested — the police searched his residence and seized computers. Graber spent 26 hours in jail even before facing the wiretapping charges that could conceivably put him away for 16 years.

[...]

The legal argument prosecutors rely on in police video cases is thin. They say the audio aspect of the videos violates wiretap laws because, in some states, both parties to a conversation must consent to having a private conversation recorded. The hole in their argument is the word “private.” A police officer arresting or questioning someone on a highway or street is not having a private conversation. He is engaging in a public act.

It’s always distressing when people who are vested with special powers in order to keep public order abuse those powers to harass or intimidate members of the public they purportedly serve. In Canada, the events surrounding the G20 protests are a recent example of how quickly power without oversight becomes abusive. There were countless stories of police harassing innocent people, conducting mass arrests and detaining people without charges. Oh, and lying about what authority they had to arrest people.

In the case of the G20 abuses, one of the ways word got out about police excess was the use of video. I would hate for police officers to be viewed with automatic suspicion, but people we respect and expect to do the right thing do not get a free pass because they are in uniform.

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August 3rd, 2010

Germany’s recovery is premised on a bailout of the work force


The Globe and Mail has published another interesting article in its ongoing “Broken Europe” series. Writer Doug Saunders writes about Germany’s unique experiment in recovering from the Great Recession: bailing out workers instead of industry.

Now, to be sure, the government of Angela Merkel has intervened in the economy in a variety of ways similar to governments elsewhere. The recent bailout of Greece was partly financed with German Euros. However, Germany’s domestic recovery program has been different from its neighbours:

Germany did something different. While its neighbouring countries spent hundreds of billions bailing out banks, financing infrastructure and stimulating the economy, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative-liberal coalition government also took a very large, unique gamble by spending huge sums of money bailing out its work force.

In a system known as kurzarbeit, or “short-time work,” the German government pays up to two-thirds of the salary of employees who would otherwise be laid off, as long as they remain employed. The employer is expected to cover any hours actually worked and to keep up their pension and benefit payments.

As a result, many would-be layoffs have instead resulted in work forces reducing their hours, with workers splitting the work and taking in less pay in return for remaining employed. The whole idea is still a gamble since Germany needs to fully recover from the recession sometime in 2010 or the kurzarbeit program will become too expensive to continue to finance, but in the meantime it has spared Germans much hardship seen elsewhere. This year, the unemployment rate is seven per cent, the lowest it has been for 17 years.

One car plant manager describes the effects of the program on workers:

“If you are six months at home doing nothing, it changes your personality,” Mr. Caspari said. “You not only lose the ability to build this car, but even to get up in the morning and make it to work. There are good reasons to keep people active in the work system. You can bridge the time and keep hope.”

Maybe this work-force-bailout scheme only works in Germany, or at least, only in export-driven countries. Economies like the United States and Canada, which are consumer-driven may not have been able to take advantage of the same circumstances, but I’ll leave that for an economist to explain. In the meantime, the article and the entire “Broken Europe” series is well worth a look.
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July 29th, 2010

Paul Rudd in Wet Hot American Summer

I just found this hilarious scene from 2001′s Wet Hot American Summer. Paul Rudd plays Andy, the unbelievably obnoxious sleazeball bully. Probably the funniest scene in that movie takes place in the cafeteria.

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July 12th, 2010

What exactly is Sarah Palin running for again?


Sarah Palin’s Political Action Committee, SarahPAC, recently released this two-minute campaign-style video that rallies conservative women to have a “mom awakening” or something. This could very well be the single worst political ad ever produced. The video features very vague calls for female political involvement and a truly awful comparison to “Mama Grizzlies.”

Political ads aren’t known for their intellectual heft, but at least one can usually tell what office the politicians are running for. The Palin ad, on the other hand, couples meaningless political language with a person with absolutely nothing to promote but her media profile.

To be fair, Sarah Palin gets mocked a lot more than she perhaps deserves, and some truly staggering acts of stupidity have turned out to be hoaxes, like the post-election revelation that she did not know Africa was a continent. On the other hand, Palin is clearly not a qualified enough person to be seriously considered as a potential presidential candidate, especially given that she quit the only important job she held only two and a half years into her term as Alaska governor. Indeed, she is barely qualified to be a serious commentator on Fox News, but that has never stopped any American cable news channel before.

The most important thing to remember about Sarah Palin is that she simply will not ever become president. A CBS News poll from earlier this year shows that 71 per cent of Americans do not want her to run for president in 2012. Even among Republicans, a majority do not hold favourable views of her and poll after poll solidifies this truth.

Yet despite the obvious fact that she is not a serious contender for the presidency, every remark she utters on TV and every post she makes on Facebook gets scrutinized and dissected by media outlets hoping to gauge her chances in 2012. It’s easy to see why this symbiotic relationship exists between Palin and the press. She profits from the endless speculation in the form of book sales, speaking fees and media exposure; meanwhile, media outlets get more page views and more magazine/newspaper sales with every Palin piece they run because she evokes such strong emotions in both supporters and detractors.

At some point though, being controversial and uninformed is simply not enough to credit continued coverage. Otherwise, why isn’t Mel Gibson a more prominent social and political commentator?

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July 9th, 2010

An exciting World Cup ends with a surprising final on Sunday


ISHMAEL N. DARO
Sports Writer

This Sunday’s World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands marks several important milestones in football history.

The first is that “soccer” is finally being called by its proper name: football. Although this is undoubtedly going to vanish as soon as the CFL and NFL seasons get exciting, it’s a nice role-reversal for fans of the beautiful game.

The second milestone is that Canadians (and Americans) are increasingly embracing the sport and taking it seriously. Of course, people say this every four years when the World Cup comes around, but even if football’s popularity waxes and wanes it is definitely enjoying a long-term upward trend. The numbers help illustrate this. ESPN has seen its ratings double since the 2006 tournament. In Canada, the CBC reported over a million combined television and web viewers for many of the games.

There have been numerous other surprises to come from South Africa that have made it hard to sustain a narrative about the tournament. Hosted for the first time on the so-called “Dark Continent,” this was supposed to be Africa’s time to shine. However, five of the six African teams languished in the group stage despite fielding some of the world’s best players. Only Ghana progressed to the knockout stage, where they lost in a nail-biter to Uruguay.

South American teams didn’t fare much better. Only a week ago, many people expected an all-South American final between powerhouses Brazil and Argentina, but that too was not to be. Other traditional powers like Italy, France and England also put forth disappointing efforts, which led to the very unlikely final match this Sunday between Spain and the Netherlands.

Spain has long been an underachiever in international football. Despite being home to one of the most competitive leagues in the world, Spain only recently made its mark as a national team, winning the European championship in 2008. Since then, Spain has been a favourite to win the World Cup as well, but superstitious football observers will be quick to note that history matters — and history hasn’t been a friend to the Spanish national team.

Another team labouring under history’s weight is the Dutch side. The Netherlands also has a European championship to its name — from 1988 — but it is their 1974 and ‘78 World Cup appearances that continue to cast a long shadow over the team. The Dutch played a fiercely offensive style in both competitions known as “Total Football” and managed to reach the final both times, only to be denied by host nations Germany and Argentina.

Total Football allows players to seamlessly trade positions, where each player is a potential goal-scorer in a relentlessly attacking style of play. This tactic had its greatest cheerleader in Dutchman Johann Cruyff, who exported it to Spain where he was wildly successful both as player and coach. Watch the Spanish side’s quick, short passes while they suffocate their opponents with possession and you can see that Cruyff’s legacy lives on, albeit in a more modern form. And despite a rocky start to this tournament, Spain finally looks like it might be ready for a World Cup trophy.

The Netherlands, meanwhile, has largely abandoned the free-flowing tactics it made famous and adopted a more deliberate, cautious style of play. For years, promising Dutch squads would ride into tournaments pressured to both win and look good doing it. Faced with sides more worried about winning, the Dutch would inevitably fall to opportunistic counter-attacks or be defeated in penalties, earning a reputation as “beautiful losers.”

This time around, however, coach Bert van Marwijk has taken great pains to disavow Holland’s Total Football past and has actually produced results, propelling the Dutch to their first World Cup final in 32 years.

Sunday’s final will see the World Cup finally go to one of the two biggest underachievers in football, but regardless of who hoists the trophy, it has definitely been a historic and exhilarating journey.

A version of this article appeared on the Sheaf’s website.

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June 11th, 2010

The World Cup is here!


Every four years, even North Americans have to stop and acknowledge the global force of football, lamely known as soccer on the continent. This year’s World Cup in South Africa may be one of the most exciting in a generation as at least eight different teams able to mount a successful campaign to become the next world champions.

As always, my family is rooting for the Dutch. I’m not entirely sure how it developed but the Oranje has been our team for as long as I can remember. Within Europe, they probably play football that most closely resembles the Brazilian style. Currently, Netherlands is ranked 4th by FIFA and they could well break with their reputation as a chronic under-performer.

Aside from the teams, there are also individual players to watch for including England’s Wayne Rooney, Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, and the world’s best player, Argentina’s Lionel Messi.

There is a fascinating profile of the 5’7 player in Sports Illustrated that highlights what huge expectations the country has for him, especially since the last great Argentine player, Diego Maradona, is coaching the team. Here is a brief excerpt of the piece, talking about how crazy Argentina is:

The easy conclusion, of course, is that the country is mad. Yes, anyplace can seem bizarre to a stranger, but let’s agree that Argentina’s lunacy is more obvious than, say, Denmark’s. Argentina is, after all, the nation with the most psychoanalysts per capita; the country whose still-feverish devotion to a long-dead First Lady resulted in a town, Ciudad Evita, built in the shape of her head; the land where citizens fearlessly consume beef for breakfast or with afternoon coffee and erupt in street protests for any reason at all. On an April afternoon, for example, picketers halted rush-hour traffic on the highway into Buenos Aires, expressing outrage over the damage caused by a recent hailstorm. “Protesting the hail,” said a lifelong resident with a shrug. “Of course.”

[link]

Finally, this year’s World Cup marks the first time that it has been hosted in Africa. Many people hope this year’s competition can be a turning point for the entire continent as countries continue to build up their institutions and take a leadership role in the world. During Thursday’s opening ceremonies, South African archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu welcomed the world by saying:

“Africa is the cradle of humanity. So we welcome you home, all of you… Every single one of you, we are all Africans. And we want to say to the world, thank you for helping this ugly, ugly, ugly caterpillar, which we were, to become a beautiful, beautiful butterfly.”

Let the games begin.

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June 4th, 2010

A split in the international Jewish community

One of the interesting developments in the ongoing controversy about Israel’s raid on an aid convoy bound for Gaza has been the international condemnation that has come about about not only Israel’s raid but also the siege of Gaza and the larger Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Criticism of Israeli policies has also been growing among Jewish communities both in and outside of Israel, although you wouldn’t know it from North American officials and press.

Today Al-Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara writes about the two main Jewish ideologies of the last century and asks what the silent Jewish majority’s response is to increasingly aggressive Israeli policies:

Since the beginning of the 20th century, Jewish communities, especially those with a strong presence in Europe, Russia and the US, have been polarised between two trends, Zionist nationalism and universal humanism. The former underlined their Jewishness as a nationality and the latter their universality as citizens of the world.

These polar perspectives hardened with each development of the 20th century – from the pogroms of its opening decades, through to the second world war and the Holocaust. They even continued with the establishment of the state of Israel.

The Zionists believed that Jews had much to learn from the genocide in Europe and that this necessitated a major shift in Jewish history – a break with the past. They went on to establish a “Jewish state” on 78 per cent of Palestine, leaving two thirds of Palestinians as refugees after destroying more than 300 of their towns and villages during and after the war that followed Israel’s declaration of statehood.

The universalists believed it was Europe that had to learn from the second world war and undergo a serious shift in the way it functioned. They joined and at times led or defended some of the most important ideologies aimed at introducing change – from communism to democratic capitalism and social democracy.

There is also an engrossing analysis by Peter Beinart of growing Jewish discontent with Israeli policies among American Jews, written for the New York Review of Books:

Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal.

One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

In his piece, Beinart discusses the militant nationalism that has developed among many Jews in America about Israel, to the point that no action undertaken by that state is sufficiently controversial for much of the Jewish-American establishment to question or condemn. In response to this though-provoking piece, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League essentially proves Beinart’s thesis by writing a very one-sided letter blaming the Palestinians for much of the current state of Israeli-Palestinian relations and the tattered peace process. Beinart answers that letter very eloquently as well. The exchange is available here.

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June 2nd, 2010

Unchallenged lies in the Globe and Mail


The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, ran an article today about the May 31 flotilla raid that killed at least nine peace activists and injured dozens more. The writer, Patrick Martin, spends most of the article quoting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his spokespeople or other cheerleaders who continue to pretend that Israel is the victim in the flotilla incident as well as the larger territorial struggle with Palestinians.

Here is Barry Rubin, director of Israel’s Global Research in International Affairs Center, who “believes the world should have little difficulty understanding the intensity of the threat felt by Israelis.”

“Hamas has oppressed the people of the Gaza Strip. [It has] murdered Palestinian Authority supporters in hospitals and thrown them off roofs; driven the Christians out; taken relief supplies for its own soldiers; launched a war on Israel in December 2008 that caused avoidable death and destruction, and used civilians as human shields and mosques for ammunition dumps,” Mr. Rubin said.

Even leaving aside the assertions about driving Christians out and using human shields, which are not contested or verified by the Globe, Rubin’s claim that it was Hamas that set off the 2008 Gaza war is beyond a shadow of a doubt an outright lie. It has long been recognized that it was Israel that broke the six-month ceasefire with Hamas in 2008 and started the war. After all, what possible motive would Hamas have to invite the brutal invasion that followed? The terms of the ceasefire were that Hamas would stop rocket attacks into Israel in return for a lift of the cruel blockade that Israel had imposed on the 1.5 million residents of Gaza. And while some rockets were still fired into Israel, Hamas mostly kept its end of the bargain. (In addition to Hamas, there are other militant groups in Gaza that also fire rockets into Israel over which Hamas had little control.) Israel, on the other hand, completely failed to uphold its promises.

That’s not just me saying it. It’s not just Hamas saying it. It was a U.N. report that said:

The Palestinian side adhered to the ceasefire, with relatively few exceptions, and relied on violence almost exclusively in reactive modes, while Israel failed to implement its undertaking to lift the blockade and seems mainly responsible for breaking lulls in the violence by engaging in targeted assassinations and other violent and unlawful provocations, most significantly by its air strike of 4 November 2008.

Yet despite this well-established fact, the Globe and Mail ran a lie from a Israeli mouthpiece that does a disservice to its readers and perpetuates the post-Gaza war efforts of Israel and its unquestioning allies that the 2008 invasion was somehow legitimate or justified. The so-called Operation: “Cast Lead” came right before an election and all three main political parties in Israel were talking tough. Their efforts to out-tough one another led directly to the breaking of the ceasefire, the subsequent war and the 1400 deaths. The whitewashing of the flotilla raid follows this same pattern, where Israeli propaganda finds its way into Canadian and American homes via our unquestioning, biased press. That, in return, gives our cowardly leaders the cover to continue to support Israeli actions in the Middle-East, no matter how unjust.

Israel broke the ceasefire. Get it right, Globe and Mail.

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June 1st, 2010

Israel’s latest outrage


Much has been said about yesterday’s raid on a flotilla of aid ships headed for Gaza. Most of the international reaction to the illegal and lethal takeover of the ships has been unequivocally condemning of Israeli actions. Here in North America, however, the propagandists were hard at work trying to blame the victims.

Here are the facts.

Israeli forces boarded the ships in international waters, where Israel enjoys no sovereignty and no jurisdiction. That makes it either an act of piracy or a declaration of war against Turkey, whose flag was flown atop the ship that saw at least nine activists killed and dozens more injured.

The so-called Freedom Flotilla was trying to break the siege of Gaza, which has been enforced by Israel and Egypt since 2007. Although some humanitarian aid is allowed in by Israel, much else is arbitrarily blocked from entering the territory. For example, chic peas are allowed but chocolate is not.

The Associated Press reports:

Military bureaucrats enforcing Israel’s blockade of Gaza allow frozen salmon filet, facial scrub and low-fat yogurt into the Hamas-ruled territory. Cilantro and instant coffee are another matter — they are banned as luxury items.

Over the past three years, Israel has determined down to the tiniest detail what gets into the Gaza Strip and to its population of 1.5 million, using secret guidelines to differentiate between humanitarian necessities and nonessential luxuries in its blockade meant to squeeze the Islamic militant group Hamas.

The results are often baffling.

“Frozen salmon — we never had it before the blockade,” said perplexed salesman Abed Nasser, examining a frozen chunk of fish.

The blockade has left 60.5 per cent of Gaza Strip households are food insecure and an additional 16.2 percent are vulnerable to food insecurity, according to the World Food Programme and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

The most humiliating effects of the blockade are that Palestinians in Gaza have largely been unable to rebuild homes, schools and hospitals that were demolished in Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza. That is because Israel will not allow such basic building materials as cement and pipes to enter the territory because Hamas could potentially use those supplies to build bunkers and crude missiles. Therefore, the entire territory is forced to starve among the ruins of a war that killed about 1,400 people, most of them civilians and children.

Because the Gaza siege punishes the entire population for the crimes of a few (Hamas), it constitutes collective punishment, which is illegal under international law.

Even now, Israel is holding hundreds of peace activists who were aboard the aid ships and sticking to the absurd story that their elite commandos could not subdue club-wielding activists without deadly force. The country has been condemned by Britain, France, Turkey, and many others.

By contrast, the reaction from the United States was muted. After successfully watering down a UN Security Council resolution to avoid blaming Israel, they even suggested an investigation of the deadly raid could be conducted by Israel itself rather than impartial international agencies.

In Canada, meanwhile, both Prime Minister Harper and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff refused to criticize Israel. Despite their clear violation of international law and use of excessive force.

The Ottawa Citizen, in an official editorial, more or less exemplified the unquestioning pro-Israel mindset that has increasingly come to dominate politics in Canada, tarring any initiative to alleviate the intense suffering of Gazans as supporting terrorism:

The flotilla claimed to be filled with peaceful pro-Palestinian activists whose aim was to bring aid to Gaza. Israel intercepted the ships to make sure the “activists” weren’t delivering weapons to Gaza. Remember, Gaza is ruled by Hamas, a.k.a the Islamic Resistance Movement, dedicated to Israel’s destruction.

…

For Israel, it really is lose-lose: Allow Hamas supporters to bring unknown cargo into Gaza, and Israeli civilians will die from the ensuing terror attacks once the weapons are unpacked and assembled. But if Israel forcibly confronts possible smugglers, there’s a chance people will get killed.

Hmm, by the sounds of it, it was the unarmed peace activists who were the villains here.

If anything good can come of this incident, it may be that international pressure will force the Israelis to end their cruel siege of Gaza and start working toward a tenable peace. The only way that can happen though is for our leaders and for the press to stop cowering in fear and tell the truth.

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