Politics

Grew up with politics. Got involved in politics. Studied politics. Gave up on politics, politicians anyway. However, there are political issues and personalities that come to the front where I do end up with a particular interest. Sometime the issue brings back the passion that pervaded my being in my earlier years; that is, it is something I care about. These pages reflect these issues.

I wrote the above paragraph sometime ago and then it happened - something I care about happened, or more accurately something happened and I began to care again. The event that triggered this caring? Hezbollah and Hamas crossed the line and kidnapped Israeli soldiers. This action opened the gates of hell and from those gates fire, death and destruction came.

War in the middle east again. It was not the war that awoke me but rather the minority Conservative government, having spent most of the summer cozying up to Bush and his neo-con buddies, declaring that what Israel was doing in retaliation was okay. Stephen Harper even found it okay that there were Canadian casualties as a result of the Israeli onslaught. Even excused the missile attack on a UN observation post.

I, like so many other Canadian, have sat back proud that I am a Canadian and knowing that whatever that is, it isn't American. We have avoided the war mongering of Bush and his neo-cons. Some how I thought we were better, and then, almost without warning, we have a leader who declares synergy with Bush. We have a leader that mimics the US line, even though the idea of world domination is held by a minority of Americans. It scares the hell out of me and I like so many others find that it is time to rise up.

My first action in protest of the government's support of the Israeli response was to attend a mass rally starting at the Israeli consulate with a march to the US consulate. I used the protest as a starting point for learning about the conflict. This is more reliable that turning to the media.

The major Toronto dailies tend to be too beholding to special interests to be trusted as a reliable source of interest, unless of course you are one of those special interests. This unbalanced approach to news varies from very skewed to slightly skewed. In the case of the middle east we have the National Post which tends to be pro-Israeli (and I must say that I find the Post's take on the world so scary that I am pleased there is a limited readership). On the other side we have the Toronto Star, which attempts to be more balanced but some of the papers logic fails me. However, there are a number of writers who have not been silenced.

My quest for knowledge and my awakening are set out in the mid east politics pages.

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