More outrage from Caledonia...

A very serious crime...and a very light sentence...

Mr. Gualtieri was a construction worker who was developing four homes at the Stirling South subdivision, located a kilometre from the disputed territory. On Sept. 13, 2007, Mr. Gualtieri and members of his work crew arrived at one of those houses, and found three natives inside. A confrontation ensued, and Richard Smoke, a then-18-year-old native man, began to fight with Mr. Gualtieri while his underage companions fled. When Mr. Gualtieri’s work crew entered the half-built home, they found him badly injured on the ground, while Smoke beat him with a piece of lumber he was swinging with both arms.

Mr. Gualtieri suffered severe injuries to his face and head, and sustained permanent brain damage. To this day, he has trouble reading, speaks slowly and walks with difficulty. He has not been able to return to work.

The guilt of the assailant, Richard Smoke, has been established by the courts — he was found guilty of break and enter and aggravated assault in September. And no one disputes the seriousness of the crime: Judge Alan Whitten described the assault against Mr. Gualtieri to have been “just a notch below culpable homicide.” He added that this “very serious and grave offence” did not advance “any ideology or idea” — was not politically motivated, in other words. It was a brutal assault, well removed from the actual occupation, and one that continues to have lasting ramifications for Mr. Gualtieri, who will, as Judge Whitten wrote, “live life as a brain-damaged man.”

Yet Smoke’s lawyer argued that her client was raised in a culture of racism, and negatively impacted by the legacy of the residential school system (of which Smoke himself was never a part, having been born a full 15 years after the last residential school in Ontario closed). She asked Judge Whitten to consider the “aboriginal perspective” when determining Smoke’s sentence.

Consider it, Judge Whitten most certainly did. For a vicious assault on an unarmed man who was going about his lawful business on private property, Smoke was sentenced to only two years and 11 months. With time served, Smoke will serve less than two years behind bars for a crime even Judge Whitten believes was barely below intentional murder.

Why Hamas wants to join the PLO....

Good article by Khaled Abu Toameh....

Hamas is joining the PLO not because it has changed, but out of a desire to make the Fatah-dominated organization stick to its true mission: the liberation of Palestine from Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea -- in other words, all the land that is currently Israel -- and to achieve the "right of return" for Palestinian refugees to their original villages and homes inside Israel.

Once Hamas takes control over the PLO, it will seek to cancel all agreements and understandings reached between the organization and Israel, above all the 1993 Oslo Accords. Hamas also wants the PLO to withdraw its recognition of Israel.

Hamas leaders and spokesmen are openly saying that joining the PLO does not mean that they would recognize Israel's right to exist or abandon the "armed struggle" against the Jewish state.

"Anyone who thinks that Hamas has, or will, change is living under an illusion," declared Hamas representative Osama Hamdan.

Hamdan is one of several Hamas officials who have been trying in the past few days to explain to the world that his movement has not abandoned its radical ideology and will in fact continue to fight for the "liberation of all Palestine."

Hamas is very clear once again: Our goal is the destruction of Israel...

A Traditional Jewish Christmas!

First, Merry Christmas to everybody! Here's a nice article on a traditional Jewish Christmas...

Mile End opened in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, at the beginning of this year, a deli specializing in Montreal Jewish cuisine: smoked meat instead of pastrami; poutine instead of cheese fries; those flat, sweet things they serve up there instead of what New Yorkers call bagels. Foodies loved the sandwiches. Hipsters loved the Brownstone Brooklyn setting, the Stumptown coffee, and the brunch, which is just exotic enough to be adventurous and just familiar enough to be, well, brunch.

Then, last month, Mile End began to offer an ambitious dinner menu that took your Eastern European Jewish grandmother’s evergreens and ran them through up-to-the-minute, fat-happy trends: shmaltzed radishes, veal cholent, kasha varnishkes with confit gizzards. What was this cool Canadian place doing serving traditional food? “To me, this is what deli is,” Montreal-born Noah Bermanoff, the place’s founder and co-owner, said earlier this week. “I’m not trying super-hard to be Montreal. I’m trying super-hard to serve food as I know it.”

So take a guess what Mile End is serving on Christmas Day. That’s right: Chinese food.

Titled a “traditional Jewish Christmas,” the $35 prix fixe—served to two seatings on Christmas Eve and four on Christmas Day and made right in the kitchen—will start with wonton eggdrop soup, continue to roast duck with smoked-meat fried rice and Chinese broccoli, and end with fortune cookies and orange wedges. (Mile End’s printed menu is here.) It’s your traditional Chinese meal, made hip, and—with that crucial addition of smoked meat—brushed gently with Mile End’s idiosyncrasy.

An appreciation of Christopher Hitchens...

An appreciation of Christopher Hitchens – from the right

I believe I owe my sanity to Christopher Hitchens. After 9/11, when many of my friends were questioning the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan; when so many people were wondering if Osama Bin Laden was really behind 9/11; when it seemed that the mere mention of the name George Bush prompted an immediate allergic reaction; and when that ridiculous slop called Fahrenheit 9/11 seemed to be in every cinema, it was calming to know that Christopher Hitchens had my back.

It was comforting to know that I had traveled some of the same roads as Hitchens. I was a lefty in University (I occupied the library once) and active in the anti-nuclear movement in Canada in the 1980s. I left Canada in 1983 and returned in 2000 to find Canada firmly ensconced in cultural relativism. Then 9/11 happened and the left seemed to go bonkers. For a while it was unclear whether I was the one who had gone bonkers – but Hitchens made sense of it all.

He understood the evil of Radical Islam and he understood that we had to fight terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He saw the rot of the post-modernist left and he was determined to stand for what is right. No matter if writing jobs or friends were lost – Hitchens had to stand up for the Kurds in Iraq, the Muslims in Bosnia, and the Cubans in Cuba. The left had changed, not Hitchens.

Back in 2005 and 2006, it seemed that Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 was everywhere. It was in the repertory theatres, the first-run cinemas, on campus, on TV, in book form, articles, you name it. I couldn’t believe how so many people could be taken in by such ridiculous propaganda. But not Hitchens, and who could say it like him:

“To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of “dissenting” bravery.”

Hitchens was unafraid to take on the left after 9/11 – he went after Noam Chomsky and George Galloway to name just two – but he also took on the right as well. What other journalist would have himself waterboarded to see if it was really torture? And, unafraid is the operative word. When he wrote “God is Not Great” about atheism, Hitchens went out of his way to go to the Bible belt in the US to debate. He went to North Korea, he went to Iraq, he tore down posters of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party in Beirut (getting beaten up in the process), he waged a massive campaign of support for Salman Rushdie, and he took on cancer with grace and determination.

And, while I will always be reading and re-reading Hitchen’s political writings, it is his writings on male friendship that have left an indelible impact on me. His ode to Martin Amis is his autobiography is essential reading – he describes their friendship as “the most heterosexual relationship that one young man could conceivably have with another.” The lunches, movies, dinners with Amis, James Fenton, Salmon Rushdie, Clive James and others reminds us that men are capable of incredibly strong bonding and incredibly strong feelings (something that we ignore in this feminized world).

While I didn`t always agree with Hitchens (for instance on Zionism) I would never have wanted the opportunity to debate with him. Just have a look at his many debates on YouTube. Not a pretty picture for anybody on the opposite side of Hitchens. And, that is his legacy – agree or not agree, few people could use words like Hitchens. And, few people who can use words like Hitchens have the moral strength to say what is right.

CBC Documentary now available....

This Hour Could Have 10,000 Minutes: The Biases of the CBC

You can now order copies of This Hour Could Have 10,000 Minutes. Our DVD features my opening comments from our event on November 13th, 2011, the documentary, and the panel discussion with Brian Lilley of Sun News, Stephen Taylor of the National Citizens Coalition, David Krayden of the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies, Eric Duhaime of Le Journal de Montreal, and Mike Fegelman of HonestReporting Canada.

The DVD is available for $22 (includes HST) + $2 for shipping in Canada. Please make your cheques payble to The Free Thinking Film Society, 39 Birch Avenue, Ottawa Ontario K1k 3G5.

We also have available a bonus disc with over a half hour of additional clips about the Biases of the CBC. This disc is available to anybody who donates $50 or more to the Free Thinking Film Society.

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