redjenny

Sorry I've been MIA lately. I had a final exam in Capitalist Propaganda... er... economics. Apparently, the world didn't stop just because I dropped out of it, so I have lots of reading to catch up on.

Meanwhile, here's a couple of links for you:

Donate 10.10 for MMP. Get behind this important democratic reform - especially if you live in Ontario. Lots more info here.

Sick of CNN and FOX and even CBC? Check out The Real News, "a global, alternative online news network that takes no advertising, government subsidies or corporate sponsorship. No strings. Just solid, fact-based news." If you like it, join me at the Real News Junkies.

If you haven't already done this, sign onto the Canadians for Democratic Media campaign. Read this for more info on media consolidation.

Not this (Mosul Dam in trouble - catastrophic flood could put 70% of Mosul under water), or this (Residents of Sadr City are enraged, and grieving over US airstrike and "arbitrary" arrests), and certainly not the missing weapons (Even more than originally thought) or the water and electricity crisis.

Good thing someone thinks there's "significant progress".

(Comic from Big Fat Whale)

Hooray for condom fashions!

Israeli forces practice capturing Palestinian villages by... um... capturing real Palestinian villages. Well, they might have to stop, since soldiers complained that these military exercises were unnecessary and frightened the villagers, even though no live fire was used.

Scorecard
Israeli Army: 1
Palestinian kids: 0.
That'll learn 'em to fly kites!
(h/t to Improvisations: Arab Woman Progressive Voice)

Settlers harrass and terrorize UN officers. Israel pressures farmers and herders to move by removing their water source. In other words, settlers "do the same thing as the 'legitimate' occupation authorities do: They drive the Palestinians off their land to make room for Jews."

Despite several soldiers refusing to take part in the action (and going to jail for it), Israeli forces removed dozens of Illegal Jewish settlers from two houses in Hebron today. This occurred next door to a much larger "legal" Jewish settlement, which is guarded by Israeli security.

The routine practice of humiliation of Arabs in Israel has been slightly improved. Now, instead of all non-Jewish passengers having different coloured airport baggage tags, they will only have different numbers.

Israeli and Palestinian transport unions agree to work together on several issues, including improving Palestinian transport workers' treatment at barriers and checkpoints.
Photo Credits

I finally saw Jesus Camp last night. (Yes, I know I'm late to the party.) While some of it was absolutely unsurprising, some of it did indeed send chills down my spine. There were certainly shades of my own summer indoctrination camp[PDF - thanks R.D.] but it went much farther. I recognize some of the brainwashing tactics, as they were used on us at bible camp, in particular the shame and the peer pressure to convert and repent (extra points for squeezing out some tears). While we didn't speak in tongues and writhe on the ground, the main difference was the political element featured at Jesus Camp. One of the families did a sort of pledge of allegiance to Jesus, the USA, and oddly enough, the Israeli flag.

One of the weirdest scenes was when a giant cardboard dummy (heh) of President George Bush was brought to the front of the chapel and all the kids had to pray over him. One of the scariest was the whole abortion thing. They gave the little kids tiny fetuses to hold in their soft little hands (of course they looked like wee toy babies, and nothing like a real fetus at 7 weeks - if the kids saw what a real one looks like they would probably have nightmares). They put "Life" tape over the kids mouths - there was even a scene in front of the white house. Many of these kids were far too young to understand sex, pregnancy, or any of that, so surely they had no idea what abortion actually is. In their minds abortion is baby murder, plain and simple, and it must be stopped.


In order to justify what they are doing, the camp director and some parents say they were training their little army of God as a response to how Muslims train their kids into an Islamic army.

It's no wonder, with that kind of intense training and discipling, that those young people are ready to kill themselves for the cause of Islam. I wanna see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam. I wanna see them as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places, you know, because we have... excuse me, but we have the truth!

The kids who were interviewed spoke about being warriors and not being afraid to die for God. I think they meant it metaphorically, but I'm not really sure.

The camp did an excellent job at reaching the kids' tender little minds - using stories and props that really reach the kids, making them feel special ("You are the most important generation", "God wrote the book of your life"), even letting them smash things with a hammer (coffee mugs labeled "government") - and if there's one things kids love, it's smashing things!

The children are not raised to be freethinking individuals, but vessels of God to be used. The frames in which they can think are extremely tight, and there is no respect for science or critical thought. Many of the kids are homeschooled: global warming isn't a big deal, science doesn't prove anything, evolution is a belief...

Overall, it was an excellent movie, with no commentary from the directors at all. The interviews let the camp director, parents, and kids speak for themselves.

Worth watching: the deleted scenes.

Most embarassing guest appearance: Pastor Ted Haggard.

Funniest line of the movie: "We pray over these powerpoint presentations".

Cross-posted at Leftist Movie Reviews

Just for fun, here's one of the songs we sang at camp. I'm really not making this up:
Give me gas in my Ford*
Keep me truckin for the lo-ord
Give me gas in my Ford I pray - Hallelujah!
Give me gas in my Ford
Keep me truckin for the lord
Keep me truckin til the break of day
* That's right, get 'em hooked on the right brand names early. Every one knows Jesus would drive a Ford. Foreign cars are the devil's work.

Every day her mother makes her some Bolani (Afghan fast food) and sells each one for 5 afg, almost ten cents.

She is 9 years old and wishes to go to school one day. She wishes that one day they'll have food at home and a schoolbag for her brother. She wishes for the day when he will have shoes on his feet. She is tired.

I asked her if she likes to go to school.

"If I go to school who is going to take care of my little brother and sister? Who is going to feed my mother? We don’t have a home, we don't have food, and we don't have money. That is why I am coming to the street to sell Bolani and earn a little money, to buy food for my family", she answered.

I looked down at her feet in the old torn shoes. Her toes came out and were terribly harmed. She suffers from her long walks to reach this place to sell her bread.
"Look I have no shoes to go to school; I walk 30 minutes to get here. And here I am not comfortable also, because the traffic comes towards me, forcing me to leave this place. At night when I go back home I am tired and I can’t play. So I go to sleep and early in the morning I wake up again and take me and my breads back to this place", she said.

Interview by Afghan Lord.

Legalizing education for girls, and even building schools isn't enough to ensure the education of girls (or boys). The ongoing fighting and the resulting lack of stability means little economic activity and much grinding poverty for much of the Afghan population. Poor children, as illustrated here by this interview, cannot attend school, even when it is available. They do what they can to survive. Until the airstrikes and heavy fighting stop, the country cannot truly be rebuilt, poverty and womens rights cannot be dealt with, and things like womens' rights and the education of girls will continue to be only a dream. As I've said before, Canada and the other NATO countries are using the women of Afghanistan to justify their military occupation to their own people. For the Afghan people, the Taliban pose only as much a threat as the warlords pose - the warlords we are allied with.

- Every 30 minutes, an Afghan woman dies during childbirth
- 87 percent of Afghan women are illiterate
- 30 percent of girls have access to education in Afghanistan
- 1 in every 3 Afghan women experience physical, psychological or sexual violence
- 44 years is the average life expectancy rate for women in Afghanistan
- 70 to 80 percent of women face forced marriages in Afghanistan
Source: IRIN News, March 8, 2007

Or maybe, as the Fraser Institute thinks, making them pay for education is the answer.

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 2 (IPS) - When the United Nations concluded a two-day debate Wednesday on the potential devastation from climate change, it covered a lot of territory: deforestation, desertification, greenhouse gases, renewable energy sources, biofuels and sustainable development.

But one thing the debate lacked, June Zeitlin executive director of the New York-based Women's Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO) told IPS, was a gender perspective.

"Women and children are 14 times more likely to die than men are during a disaster," she said.

In the 2004 Asian Tsunami, 70 to 80 percent of overall deaths were women. And in the 1991 cyclone disasters that killed 140,000 in Bangladesh, 90 percent of victims were women.

"Similarly in industrialised countries, more women than men died during the 2003 European heat wave," Zeitlin told a panel discussion Tuesday, in advance of a first-ever thematic General Assembly debate devoted exclusively to climate change.

She also said that following the August 2005 Hurricane Katrina in the United States, African-American women who were the poorest population in some of the affected states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi faced the greatest obstacles to survival.

She argued that women make up the majority of the world's poor, and in particular the world's rural poor, and are largely responsible for securing food, water and energy for cooking and heating.

"These statistics beg the question: Why? And what can we learn from this to fashion more effective solutions to the climate change crisis," Zeitlin said.
[...]
Zeitlin of the Women's Environment and Development Organisation said women have always been leaders in community revitalisation and natural resource management.

"Yet women are so often barred from the public sphere and thus absent from local, national and international decision-making related to natural disasters and adaptation."

There are plenty of examples where women's participation has been critical to community survival.

In Honduras, she said, La Masica was the only community to register no deaths in the wake of Hurricane Mitch in Central America in 1998 due to an early warning system operated by women in the community. (Full article at IPS News)

Women and children bear the highest degree of effect from disasters caused by climate change. Not coincidentally, they also have the least ability to effect decision-making power in the greater public sphere.

Proposal: in a true democracy a person would have input into a decision in the proportion to which that decision affects her or him. In the case of pregnancy and abortion, women, not men, should have veto power. Those who live in a neighbourhood should have power over what kind of development that neighbourhood will undergo, more so than the developer whose only interest in the neigbourhood is to build, make money, and skedaddle. People who are dying because of pollution in their town should have say in where factories can be located and how industry conducts itself in their town.
It's pretty simple, really.

... "Just 20 per cent said they 'strongly support' Canada's fight in Afghanistan".

Harumph. At least our BFF has thanked us for our role in Afghanistan, unlike those ungrateful taxpayers. Look what they're making us do! We have to make them pay $104,575 so we can learn how to sell the war to them.

The federal government could significantly boost support for the Afghan mission if it were to emphasize diplomacy and human rights, according to opinion polling compiled over seven months for the Department of National Defence.

Really? You mean emphasizing the needless suffering and civilian deaths doesn't work?

Nik Nanos, president of Ottawa's SES Research, said the government-commissioned survey is "standard ... technique for political campaigns."

"You start introducing content and you measure how you can move the dial," he said.

Right, good to know how best to massage the facts.

The poll, at a cost to taxpayers of $104,575, is the latest to look at how to present Canada's military mission to a skeptical public. Others have warned the government against appearing too militaristic, presenting the mission as payback for the 9/11 terror attacks and aligning itself with the U.S. government. All have underscored the fact that combat remains a tough sell in Canada.

What? We don't want our sons and daughters killing and dying?

Alex Morrison, head of the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies, said the challenge is how Ottawa can be honest about the military's role and still make it palatable to the public. The blame lies with previous Liberal and Tory governments that emphasized peacekeeping to such an extent that Canadian soldiers are now viewed as "simply a bunch of do-gooders," he said.

Ah yes, the eternal struggle of propaganda: how best to manipulate the public, while removing the risk of being caught outright lying. Good thing we can blame previous governments: they were so darn good, they made us look bad.