Israel Alone

Is it remotely possible that Israel and the Palestinian Authority can ever meet one another across a bargaining table with full intentions to deal frankly with one another? Before we know it a century will have passed and nothing will have been accomplished. But before then the sizzling antagonism will have surpassed anything in mutual violence that has been seen hitherto.

And there's a certain poignant inequality in all of this. Israel has found itself immensely beleaguered in the past with the combined armies of the surrounding Arab countries confronting it. And it has survived. A miracle in and of itself.

Surely the God of Abraham - not the one claimed by Islam, perforce, an interloper, a late-comer, a religion with so little imaginative creation behind it that it found itself adeptly insisting that it too benefited from its predecessors' signal deliverers unto the mysteries of the faith - intervened to save Jews from yet another breach in the trust between God and His chosen. For if the chosen were completely annihilated, who then to be a light unto the world?

After we pick ourselves off the floor, hysterical with insane laughter, we look at the advances made thus far in the intractable discussions and demands between the adversaries, the two solitudes whom geography and the dissonances of fate has thrown together. Two previous prime ministers have related that they were prepared to literally 'give away the shop' for the achievement of peace. A peace that could not be guaranteed, furthermore.

Given the demonstrated propensity in a nod to tradition, of the Arab populations to cling to their detestation of the very thought of a non-Muslim demographic within a geography dedicated to Islam. And that demographic speaking hugely of an ungrateful religious cohort whom the Prophet had compassionately offered to include in Islam, only to have his offer curtly rejected. Which is precisely why Jews are likened to viral agents, monkeys, pigs.

What a bargain. Submit to Palestinian demands - and by extension, needless to say, the demands of the greater Arab community in the Middle East, and extend a little further and include the Muslim entirety - for the surrender of Jerusalem for a Palestinian-state capital. Include the 'right of return', and a diminution of Israel's border, and what have you?

Well, most certainly the demise of a Jewish state. Israel, inundated by Palestinian returnees, representing generations of those in exile, and sans its own eternal capital. This is the greater purpose of the demands, of course. Eventually the very notion that there once existed a quaint "Jewish State" would become dim history, an anomaly of the geography never to be repeated.

The greater Arab collective has been deftly able to exert their influence - thank you, petroleum products - to enterprisingly influence all other countries dependent on their goodwill, assenting to have their UN representatives rubber-stamp condemnations of one sole, smallish country. This is the United Nations, need we repeat, whose purpose is to defend relations between countries, repair what's broken and aid human rights...?

And Israel's great defender in the West, the powerful United States of America, upon whom the tiny Middle East democracy could always depend, is torn with indecision. On the scale of weightiness there are all the countries of the Middle East who resent Israel's presence, along with the weight of the Muslim ummah, and then there is that perennial, bloody-minded, ever-assertive, right royal pain in the arse, Israel.

Truly a conundrum for this new American administration. Delivering a rebuke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, having him wait, like a lackey, for a word of assent from the White House. Friends, enemies, who can tell which is which these days?

Jerusalem

"By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres" (137, 1-2).

"If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither, let my tongue cleave to my palate if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy." (137, 5-7).

The ancient city of Jerusalem is a Jewish city. Its ancient history saw it the capital of a Jewish nation under King David and King Solomon, and then the Kings of Judah. This is the biblical Jerusalem. But Jerusalem existed as a city before it was taken to be the capital of the Jews. It is written that the prophet Ezekiel spoke of Jerusalem thus: "Thus says the Lord God to Jerusalem: your origin and your nativity is of the land of Canaan; your father was an Amorite and your mother was a Hittite" (16:30).

During the period of Egyptian hegemony in the Middle East, Jerusalem was the city of Canaanites, then Jebusites, Semitic peoples who lived in the Judean Hills. It was a small, fortified city with two strongholds, one named Zion, the name later used to describe the Temple Mount and Mount Zion, neither part of the city when it was a Jebusite protectorate. But surrounding the ancient city for two hundred years was a Jewish settlement, allotted to the tribe of Benjamin. Whose first king, Saul, lived alongside Jerusalem, until his successor, David conquered the city and made it his own.

And then came a long succession of conquerors including the Babylonians, Macedonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Persians, followed by Muslim empires, the Crusaders, the Mamelukes, the Ottoman Turks, the British, the Jordanians, and finally - full circle - the Jewish nation again, with the creation of the State of Israel. There is history and there is the incendiary dispute between Arab Palestinians and indeed the entirety of the surrounding Arab populations, resentful of Israel's creation.

This fabled, pre-biblical-era city (albeit named differently) may be three thousand years old, one of the most ancient remaining cities in the Middle East, celebrated by Jews as their eternal capital. Its population is a modest 740,000, and represents the most Orthodox of Jews, as well as Muslims and Christians for all of whom it is a city of faith. It is the walled Old City whose legitimacy as an Israeli possession is largely in dispute after the reunification of the city by modern conquest from Jordan, in 1967.

Under British and later Jordanian rule, Jews were not permitted to visit their most holy of sites, the ancient Temple Mount, nor could they pray at the Wailing Wall, the only portion of the Second Temple of Solomon left after its destruction. Under Jewish protection, all religions have free access to their holy sites. The Muslim Dome of the Rock was built directly over the ancient Second Temple, and it represents the third most sacred site for Islam. Jerusalem's biblical significance for Christians is obvious.

From historical antecedents as well as modern reality - where a Jewish presence was never absent from Jerusalem - present-day Israel, a Jewish state whose purpose was to offer a safe-haven homeland for the world's stateless and dispersed Jews, it seems a reasonable assumption that Jerusalem remain the universally-acknowledged site of the capital of Israel. That presumed reality has found vibrant denunciation in the opinion of Palestinians who claim it to be their capital for a nascent sovereign state.

Despite the historical reality that there never was a Palestinian state, that the original Palestinians were in fact Jews, and Palestine was an unacknowledged homeland for those Jews who had never left their homeland, despite the diaspora inflicted upon Jews by one conquering army after another in ancient times. History and the archaeological science that supports it, along with religious, social and traditional antecedents confirm Jerusalem as a Jewish capital of a Jewish state.

Buy American

The consuming public has always been proud to purchase products produced in their own countries. Simply because it is a general perception that durable goods produced in one's country are superior than those produced elsewhere. (Exceptions can be made for countries which traditionally, and continue to produce inferior products; the Soviet Union and modern Russia come to mind where consumers would far prefer, for example, to buy foreign vehicles than their own sub-rate products.)

In a global economy, however, with an increasing emphasis on free-trade agreements, with the inter-relatedness of production and the ease of product-transference, sans restrictive tariffs and import fees to favour domestic goods, the international community has benefited hugely from a relaxation of traditional protectionism. Canada and the United States, two huge geographies sharing a major portion of the North American continent with Mexico, had seen the benefits inherent in signing on to free trade.

Internationally, free trade agreements have increasingly been signed between countries whose geographies put them at a great distance from one another. It was also seen as a way in which developing countries, through diminished or no tariffs, could export their goods to their greater economic benefit. Certainly, free trade between Canada and the United States has had its ups and downs, given the propensity of the U.S. Congress to disallow importation of products that would deleteriously impact on U.S. producers, overriding the NAFTA.

But it's when home economies go into a slump that the protectionist elbows get sharp and aim for the soft parts. The United States government's economic stimulus package meant to help the country lift itself out of its economic doldrums through the encouragement of state and municipal infrastructure projects, gave the trade finger to its free trade allies in NAFTA, as well as those outside North America. Only U.S.-manufactured goods could be used with projects funded by the stimulus initiative.

Which is why Canadian manufacturers have seen an abrupt and now steady decline in their traditional business model. In a way this is incredibly short-sighted, given the inextricably-interwound production between the two countries, where American jobs rely on that dual-track-production just as much as Canadian jobs do. In some instances, such as pipe fittings produced in Canada, the metals are purchased and imported from the United States. Cut off the export of pipe fittings from Canada to the U.S. and the market for metals is impacted.

Canada-based brass fittings manufacturers for example, have been advised that municipal projects that used its fittings, have had to transfer to U.S.-produced fittings. At a greater cost to the municipality resulting. For some peculiar reason, when a project administer, warned not to use "Made in Canada" products begins to disassemble a project well underway, tearing out previously installed products, setting back the completion of the project in the process, it is the Canadian manufacturer who will be billed and expected to pay for the extraction of his product.

Canadian manufacturers' products already in the ground through a partially completed project are ripped out, at the expense of the Canadian manufacturer. Who, to remain in business, has the option of closing down Canada-based manufacturing to begin manufacturing in the United States if they wishe to continue supplying American customers. Canadian manufacturers have seen a steep decline in their sales, and have had to lay off employees, in some instances halving their workforce.

Canada, in fact, saw this coming. Conventionally, in their trade relationship, it has always been a Republican administration that has been open to free trade, while a Democratic administration has generally been luke-warm to free trade. With the ascension of the Democrats to power coinciding with the international financial collapse, it was foreseen that the U.S. Congress would likely take this kind of action.

Canada fondles the quaint notion that she has a special relationship with the United States. The kindly-regarded little cousin, type of thing. That, in the greater interests of preserving a friendly relationship, the United States would see its way through to granting special dispensation to Canada, its near-kin in North America. But for Canada, the "Buy American" provision of the U.S. economic stimulus bill has placed matters in their traditional perspective.

To Americans, there's us, and there's them. We're the dispensable 'them'. As for honouring the NAFTA legally-entitled provisions and guidelines; well, that's just the way it is, pardners.

An Unhinged Mind

Peoples' values and their priorities and their views on life are shaped by the societies in which they grow to maturity. But there are no guarantees that all members of any given society will submit to the general population's values, given the complexity of human nature. All the more so when there are complicating circumstances, when a society is no longer as homogeneous as it once was.

Homogeneity in any event is an oversubscribed concept, particularly in a society like that of the United States (and increasingly everywhere around the world as great masses of people migrate elsewhere than their countries of birth) with its pluralist society.

Enter an additional hugely conflicting circumstance; that of a religion traditionally foreign to the Western world, in and of itself no great barrier to social integration to a degree, but given decades-worth of antagonism and misunderstanding resulting in the radicalization of significant albeit relatively minor numbers of Muslims, a recipe for disastrous culture clashes.

When attacked, respond with a similar attack. The group that initiated the first attack can always anticipate that the counter-attack will be more determined than theirs.

But in the many instances of fanatical jihadist attacks on not only Western symbols, including the heartland of Western democracy in urban Europe and North America, along with moderate Muslim societies in the near and far east, the extent and viciousness of the attacks leave no room for complementary counter-attack and follow-up negotiations.

For there is no negotiating with groups dedicated to delivering death and eagerly anticipating their own in the process.

A deep viral contamination of fanaticism has overtaken the consciousness of a paranoid and aggrieved demographic of mostly young men in the world of Islam. Generations of colonial-status resentment followed by the reality of the West fattening itself on the exploitation of natural resources in developing, dependent countries has left the worm of resentment to ripen to a serpent of hatred.

Mired in a religion that marked an entire way of life from cradle to grave, circumscribed and adored by its followers, Muslim countries stagnated. Leaving development of their own resources to others, while resenting their reliance on the mechanics and science of other cultures.

Totalitarian and autocratic rulers relishing their growing status of wealth achievement made no effort to modernize their countries, to elevate the position of the masses beyond elemental existence. The disentitlement of the ordinary citizen deprived of human rights and hope for the future was prevalent. And their rulers side-tracked popular resentment outwardly, toward non-Muslims and Jews.

Anything that reflected Western customs, interests and traditions, was deemed corrupt and un-Islamic, and that included fashioning a civil society with all the guarantees of freedoms common to democracies and identified as repulsive to Islam. The search for knowledge in the sciences, in industry and mechanics; the necessity to industrialize and produce well-paid employment for the young also was un-Islamic.

In a search for personal attainment, freedoms and opportunities Muslims gravitated elsewhere.

But there is a deep cognitive dissonance between intermingling with Western values and permitting the diminishment of Muslim thought, values and practises. Deeply conflicting to the formidable affect of a closed culture, a disciplined religion, an un-irenic tradition. The impoverishment of freedom of thought and association resulting from Islamic traditions shunning other religions and other traditions, calling the faithful to demonstrate their resolute adherence to Islam encourages jihad.

Little wonder then, that the American-born Major Malik Nadal Hasan, a devout Muslim serving in the United States military was severely conflicted to learn he was to be dispatched to Afghanistan. When he had been attempting, without success, to encourage other enlisted men to resist serving in the counter-insurgency conflict in Afghanistan, in a desperate attempt to prove to himself his Islamic credentials, utterly polarized by his untenable position.

In the end, the psychiatrist who had been entrusted to help heal the traumatized minds of military men and women serving in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, could not heal himself. He surrendered to the escape of violent jihad, in the process slaughtering a jury's-worth of fellow Americans, and wounding three dozen in his attempted escape from his mental turmoil, his religion- and culture-inspired affliction.

The Malaise of Fear, Parnoia, Insecurity

Where could this be occurring, where social insecurity is at so high a level that an independent-minded country confirmed by its history as a free democracy, dedicated to equality among its citizens, has yet maintained a garrison mentality?

In the historical taming of a wide, wild landscape when the inconvenience of its aboriginal population sitting on the land as though they owned it, and not the white folk who arrived with a view to unobstructed ownership, firearms spoke of settlers' aspirations, determination and tough attitudes toward their personal survival.

Written directly into the Constitution of the United States of America is the uninterrupted status of the firearm as a requisite to citizenship, an honourable nod to the past, and a right to bear arms, enshrined and spoken of as a necessity to the security of a free State. "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

This is the fabled Second Amendment right. For at one time, in the wild, wild west - and even in the east - citizens were deputized to uphold the law. As such they could become part of a citizen-militia unit, requiring to be armed to fulfill their duties and obligations. That Second Amendment protects individual rights to ownership, possession and transportation of firearms.

The ferocious lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Association ensures that Members of Congress remember who votes them into office. And a majority of Americans, as it happens, support the right to gun ownership, while a smaller number support gun control. It has now become legal to carry concealed weapons, ostensibly for protection, into wildlife areas of national parks.

When Congress gave approval to legislation on credit-card abuses, there was a little add-on allowing visitors to national parks to carry loaded, concealed weapons. And although President Obama expressed his grave reservations before he even came to the President's office, he understood well that to pass his own legislation he would also have to pass the guns-in-parks law. Quid pro quo.

Advocates for gun control legislation are in despair, seeing the level of their public support steadily eroding.

And in the current state of the economic downturn in the United States - even while unemployment is growing, real estate values still plummeting, retail sales struggling and the country facing an enormous deficit and an immensely crippling debt, the interest on which will put its financial feet to the fire - the public has gone berserk over firearms purchases.

More than the purchases of firearms; the stockpiling of ammunition. Manufacturers are unable to supply enough ammunition to gun shops, to meet the demand. Gun owners have purchased roughly 12 billion rounds of ammunition in the year past, up considerably from previous years' sales. People are even frantically buying up ammunition meant for firearms they don't yet own.

The fears seem to stem from the potential for gun-control legislation under the Obama administration.

With the scarcity of enough stock, prices have tripled, but still gun owners are buying up what they can, and hoarding it against the possibility they may one day not be able to access ammunition.

And the true irony in all of this is that the most recent FBI statistics for crime in the country, indicate that violent crime is at its lowest in twenty years.

Political Priorities

Things can get pretty miserable when ancient faux pas come to light at the most inconveniently vexing of times. Something like kicking a man when he's down? Sometimes, though some people deserve a good posterior whacking.

It's just that poor old Michael Ignatieff has caught a few too many for his comfort, of late. Things are set to change, however, with the investiture of a proven and able public relations manager. Too late, alas, to alter statements made in the distant past, coming back to haunt him now, however.

But, as one of the Liberal leader's stalwart apologists loftily declaimed, when enquiries about Mr. Ignatieff's previously indiscreet and ungenerous observations about the British Monarchy were put front and centre: "The leader is focused on the issue of H1N1. Right now, Canadians are worried about lines for flu shots, not lines of succession. This is not an issue Canadians are focused on."

Priorities thus having been set, the eye and ear turns dutifully to that top-of-mind-topic. The House of Commons emergency debate on H1N1 revealed some interesting little tidbits. Preceded by hysteria-prone Vancouver Liberal MP Hedy Fry complaining that an H1N1 clinic be set up instanter on Parliament Hill to inoculate parliamentarians because of all that hand-shaking they engage in.

Not to be outdone, Carolyn Bennett, she of the mockingly disgusting flyer intimating body bags, not H1N1 vaccines can be anticipated to solve any health problems for First Nations communities under this Conservative-led government has done her enlightened bit. Doing her leader right proud.
Not to be outdistanced by the distaff side, Bob Rae ventured his august opinion that had the government ensured H1N1 vaccine was available sooner, 13-year-old Evan Frustaglio might not have died; such is the fallout of an uncaring, unprepared, and forewarned government. But then it is understandable that such a horrible event could occur, when you have a government concerned, as Liberal president Alf Apps is quick to explain, that there is "some clinical cost-benefit analysis, premised on the theory that expense could be avoided if demand for the vaccine were suppressed and access to immunization for most was made well nigh impossible."

These statements give slander a good name. Nasty, small-minded and viciously casual with reality. And the truth lies mortally wounded from one stab after another, with Liberals lining up to inflict the final, wrenching, arterial bloodletting. Rational decision making on the part of the Chief Medical Officer along with provincial counterparts agreeing that the country's seasonal flu vaccine had production priority, simply because it kills 4,000 Canadians a year, as opposed to the 101 having perished from the effects of H1N1 to date.

And the unadjuvanted version taking precedence because WHO understood that this was safer for pregnant women and young children than the adjuvanted version ordered by Canada as a more effective vaccine, interrupting the greater production of that immune-boosting vaccine. That interruption has now passed, and production has resumed, ensuring that anticipated amounts of vaccine will be on hand to inoculate all Canadians who wish to take advantage of vaccination against H1N1.

In any event, according to statistics gleaned thus far from eight provinces a mere third of the initial vaccine supplied by the federal government over the last several weeks had been used by week's end. In Ontario alone the Minister of Health confirmed that out of 2.2 million doses received from federal health authorities, a mere 300,000 had been administered to the most vulnerable among the public. How is that a signal of tardy response by the federal government?

And, despite Mr. Ignatieff's stout assertion that Canada has fallen behind other countries such as the United States, the fact of the matter is in the U.S. with its far greater population a mere 25 million doses have been shipped in comparison to about 7 million in Canada. Comprende?

Psychically Abandoned

Groucho Marx's oft-quoted flippancy in his observation that he would not join any club insufficiently discriminating as to accept his membership actually spoke clearly to a peculiarity in deviant human behaviour. There is a mirror-image to that remark. We see its impact on those who profess to 'understand' and feel sympathy and collegiality with societal outcasts and social malefactors, those rejecting societal norms.

We see it in the Manson cult, the acquiescence of the women of Bountiful, the young teen who felt such empathy with her community's grubs and who, for her effort, was gang-raped outside Los Angeles, and in those Western, previously Christian women who feel sympathy for those they see as the oppressed, and adopt Islam to synchronize their sympathies with their commitments. Invariably we see it in women's responses to men's rejections of values held in common respect.

We see it in the all-too-common syndrome of hardened criminals, including multiple-murderers having been brought to justice and incarcerated as a result of their crimes against society, being contacted by ordinary-seeming women who conceive an attraction to them, befriend them, and sometimes marry them. Obviously, this is an expression of a syndrome, of a frail personality seeking some meaning in life to support their emotional turmoil, and fixating on those who reject society and whom society has rejected.

We see its effects on children who have been abducted, kept prisoners for years, constantly raped by their abductor, covertly bearing his children in dreadful living conditions. Yet to survive the horror that their existence has become, they form an emotional bond, an attachment of psychical need to their captor. This is a symptom named the Stockholm Syndrome, coined in 1973 in the wake of a bank robbery in Sweden, and the hostage-taking of three women and a man over a period of five days.

Even though the hostages were held in the vault of the bank, strapped with dynamite until their rescue, they came out of their ordeal feeling sympathy for the men who had so dreadfully abused them. A few years later, when the American newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was a hostage, she exhibited the same sympathetic attachment to her abductors and joined ranks with them in their later robberies. Psychologists explain the syndrome as one where a damaged psyche results from great trauma.

The British Columbia woman, Beverley Giesbrecht, who found herself attracted to the concept of violent jihad as a justified response by fanatical Islamists to what she perceived as Western hostility toward Islam and Muslims, transformed herself from a functioning, if somewhat unhappily confused adult with a miserable childhood into a fundamentalist, jihad-supporting Muslim. She left her old life behind her, travelled to Afghanistan, and made contact with the Taliban.

She believed that her status as a (converted) Muslim, a supporter of violent jihad would give her immunity from danger at the hands of the Taliban, and lend her a certain measure of respect. Enabling her to interview high-placed Taliban leaders, and perhaps even gain her entry to the presence of Osama bin Laden. And with her background as a journalist, and with the prestige of her jihadist website, she would scoop the media with her insights and authentic videos and interviews.

All for the purpose of advancing the agenda of fanatical global jihad, for she considered herself a supporter of that movement. Like others who had converted to Islam, and who spent their energies and their determination in an effort to better the lives of ordinary, poverty-stricken Muslims in theatres of violence, and who were summarily dispatched as interfering Westerners for their efforts, she too has been abducted and ostensibly held for ransom.

Demonstrating the delicate balance of peoples' ability to forge relationships of meaning and value when confronted by the mystifying (to some) disequilibrium between societies, religions, traditions, and hereditary customs, confounded latterly by the clash of worlds far apart from one another through all of those significant parameters. And while that is an interesting and unfortunate set of circumstances for very particular personalities, it also points at a more generalized failing of society at large.

Where ostensibly intelligent, well educated, secular or religious factions of society see little threat to what they hold dear at the presence within their country of those being singled out by intelligence agencies as adherents to, or supporters of, religious fanaticism. When, in fact, their governments and government security agencies, use their powers to pursue and arrest activities meant to threaten and terrorize, these educated and sympathetic groups accuse the government and its agents of persecution.

That in pursuing the greater safety and security of the country, its people and its infrastructure, let alone its way of life, government and its security and policing agencies are abandoning our most dearly-held values and freedoms by abusing the human rights entitlements of those whom they deem to be innocent of evil intent simply because they are unable to digest reality.