Campaign to stop Iranian’s execution grows – The Globe and Mail.
The Globe and Mail reports this am that Canadian diplomats in Iran were unable to confirm that the death by stoning sentence has been commuted. The more voices the better, calling for an end to this barbarism. The petition can be found at the link below.
Reports this morning tell us that the Iranian judiciary have commuted the death by stoning of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani to death by some other means. Prior to this she endured 99 lashes and torture to extract a confession which she has recanted. Stoning takes at least 10 minutes as the stones are supposed to be fist sized and not thrown hard enough to kill right away. At the same time, buried up to her neck in sand, the woman cannot breathe.
It is impossible to feel enough outrage towards this barbarism. It is possible to take one small step towards adding voices to the calls for her release. Heather Reisman and others have instituted a petition that is credited with preventing the stoning. but Sakineh will still die, now having her neck broken or her life squeezed from her by the hangman’s rope. Perhaps they have learned how to make that process lengthy as well. The link to the petition follows:
First the Toronto Police was all praise for the actions of the police, now they want an inquiry. Not a full public inquiry, mind, but just one man, looking into what happened. No parameters have been set, and this inquiry will not be into the role of the Mounties, or the OPP.
To me the most egregious action was what happened on Sunday night: the rounding up of citizens, holding them in difficult circumstances without regard for their need for food, water, toilet facilities or ongoing medical care, including for example insulin, anti-epileptic drugs, cardiac medication. People in the crowd said the police wouldn’t talk to them, so how were they to judge whether an individual had needs that should be met. I’ve heard people say that the people shouldn’t have been there. That’s not the point. They had the right to protest, and they surely had the right to be walking along the street minding their own business, even if that business was watching the crowd.
To me the questions are who made the decision to corral those people, on what basis and did the man or men in charge know the decision was taken before or after they saw it on television. It doesn’t really need a public inquiry, just some frank talk from however high the questions have to float before they are answered. I understand Harper has gone for a photo-op to Saskatchewan, so perhaps McGuinty or Miller will have to do.
On another note, it cost 4 million dollars or thereabout for the Queen’s whole visit. A reckoning on the 1 billion dollars spent for security would be nice while they are telling us some facts.
Many voices are calling for a public, not police inquiry into the police action in Toronto at the G20. The latest is Tabitha Southey writing in the Globe and Mail yesterday.
There are comments to her article, including one from a chap who seems to think that we live in a police state where citizens can be arbitrarily ordered off the street by police. He seems to be confusing, as another reader pointed out, the police with the law. In one of Rex Stout’s novels, a policeman is demanding entry to Nero Wolfe’s house. “Open up, in the name of the law,” he demands. the character Archie Goodwin answers mildly, “As you Know, it’s the law that keeps you out.” It’s the law that allows protest that is peaceful.
I watched the protest on Sunday night of the G20 from beginning to end. I watched demonstarters and journalists, dog-walkers and cameramen being encircled, held for “processing’ and bussed off to ..?where? Unlike the day before, I saw no one in black masks( the sight of which enrages me); I saw no vandalism. I admit that for a while the people did occupy the center of an intersection as they were prevented from going forward with their march. I understand they were told three times to move. Apparently this is a magic number after which the police can move in with their circle of armed men.
Ms Southey says she was terrified. I can believe it. I, sitting in my safe living room at more than 100 kilometres away, was shocked and appalled. If the police and the politicians who set the rules have an explanation for the people of this country, let’s hear it. If they knew there were violent individuals, armed and dangerous, in the crowd, show us the evidence. Bring them to court.
Ms. Southey also reports individual policemen mocking the psychiatric patients who had come out onto the street. (I’m not sure how people on the street were being identifies as psychiatric patients. I don’t imagine they were wearing signs.) Can anything have been more frightening to a disturbed mind than the sight of large men, dressed in black, with helmets and truncheons and guns, harassing and mocking? there appears to be a need for training on many levels.
Who were the police on the streets? Were they Toronto police, OPP(as those on the ground were reporting) members of police forces from other cities? Were they angry because of their experience with the Black Bloc the day before? Ms. Southey reports that they seemed to be spoiling for a fight.
For an another point of view, read Christie Blatchford in the same edition of the Globe and Mail at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/self-anointed-g20-journalists-should-get-real/article1627346/
In her article, most of which has to to with the journalists behaviour, she mentions that police were picking people up for a breach of the police or for a breach of the peace that hadn’t yet taken place. She says this is under the old common law. I believe that the rights and freedoms under the constitution supersede that.
It all took place on a sunny afternoon, in Toronto. Only nature, a severe thunderstorm, seemed to intervene and bring an end to all of it.
CBC News – Canada – Sentencing act to cost billions: report.
The security for the G8/G20 costs 1.2 billion. The new jail terms cost billions. The law and order agenda. In Toronto this weekend we saw what that really means.
The results of all that money in Toronto: property damage, indelible memories of black-hooded thugs roaming unchecked; ordinary citizens treated like what….cattle, hardened criminals, terrorists? I watched it for several hours Sunday night, as people were encircled, man-handled, herded, hoping that someone would say something that would justify the disregard for civil rights. No one did. Eventually the police chief, Bill Blair, according to the Globe this morning, called them off. Today he said it was a large and dangerous protest. Not according to the press who were in the center of the crowd. People claimed that the police surrounding them were OPP. Who was in charge?
There were severe thunderstorms, torrential rain. No one talked to the people in the crowd. If an individual spoke to a policeman, he was arrested. People were approaching the line to get arrested so they could get out of there. A tactical decision they said. Whose?
They were apparently searching for the individuals who were in the black bloc, believing that they were going to strike again. Some said they had found weapons along Queen Street.
As I understood the powers granted under some obscure act, the police were allowed to ask for id and search within 5 metres of the fence. They were a long way from the fence, and the meetings were over.
The fence came down today. The mayor wants Ottawa, that is us, to pay for the property damage. Who is going to hold the police accountable for their actions? Or at least demand they explain them?
So the message of the marchers is lost yet again, not because the people weren’t allowed to march, thousands of them, but because a group of so-called anarchists, thugs in masks who seem to move from city to city only to destroy, are the only ones whose voices are being heard.
Many, not all, of the leaders who are in Toronto, were democratically elected. The voices of their people are heard through them. Who are these men in masks? They represent no one.
The shame of honour crimes – The Globe and Mail.
This morning in today’s Globe and Mail, Sheena Khan talks about her community’s responsibility to educate and influence immigrants to leave behind the violent ways of the old country. It is a thoughtful piece and suggests an approach such as Cease Fire in Chicago that has been successful in dealing with violent young men.
Rereading a short story of Conan Doyle this morning, I was reminded that little more than one hundred years ago in England an man could brutalize his wife and children with no interference from the law. When the women’s movement achieved success in the campaign to have women declared persons under the law, such behaviour was recognized as criminal and treated that way.
In the last paragraph, Ms Khan writes that “women are dead because they breached their families’ honour.” No they are not. They are dead because they attempted to live as free human beings and some man or men decided they shouldn’t. These men and their complicit families have no honour.
Young women are dying around the world because their family (read male) honour has been damaged by their behaviour. This is primitive barbaric nonsense.
The first link below details the murder in Brampton of a teenage girl. Not of any particular religion, she died at home, killed by her father and stepmother. No motive given.
The second link, a young woman killed by her brother and father, because she behaved like a normal Canadian teenager, rebelling against a lifestyle that condemned her to complete control by any and all males in her family.
The national geographic article and the one from the UN tells us how many girls are killed for reasons like this one, or because she didn’t bring enough dowry! The marriages of course went forward, the dowry taken, the girl killed and then, I suppose another took her place, so that the groom’s family collected twice.
The UN article makes it clear that this is institutionalized violence against women, with no or little penalty because of the “honour” involved, or the religion.
It is and always has been about control, power, and money. The religious argument is a convenient screen behind which violent abusers may hide. The screen should be removed; the perpetrators revealed for the abusing cowards that they are. There is no difference between the deaths of the young girl in Brampton and the young girl in Toronto. Both killed by the males in their family, whose duty should have been to protect them. They are murderers and child abusers, nothing more. And they never had any honour to lose.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2010/06/15/brampton-teen-homicide.html
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2010/06/15/parvez-guilty-plea.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/02/0212_020212_honorkilling.html
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=33971&Cr=violence+against+women&Cr1
The overspending becomes tedious, doesn’t it? First, the delegates are fenced into a small area of Toronto, and not the most attractive area, except for the lake itself. No, not the one in the Convention Centre, the real one visible from the hotel windows for those lucky enough to to have rooms on the South side. Second, they are surrounded by 1 billion! dollars worth of security (and there still is no accounting for where all that money is going). Finally, they and the reporters for whom this stage set was constructed, are walked past a cardboard cut-out of cottage country. As someone pointed out in the Globe this morning, they didn’t import the blackflies.
The priorities of this government are strange and speak to an astounding lack of imagination at the top. And it comes from the top. This is a government run by micro-managers, with the supreme micro-manager at the top. Remember all the directives about staying on message. This was the guy who preferred a US style press conference, with all the reporters standing up respectfully when he came in the room, and controlled questions from hand-picked journalists to the hurly-burly of the scrum. When you are looking for the guy who spent all the money that the former government set aside for a rainy day, look no further. Remember all the fiscal pain when Paul Martin was in charge of the government purse. The pain produced surpluses. They are all gone, spent to buy votes, and now we are left with deficit for years ahead. There was nothing for the rainy day that came 18 months ago. Remember Harper denying how severe it was going to be.
No fiscal conservatism here, no transparency, and no sense, common or expert. No wonder they took the Progressive out of the party’s name.
Harper’s message control is unprecedented, critics say – The Globe and Mail.
The funding for a retirement home, a mere 12,000 or so, is cause for a script, “to make sure everyone stays on message.” The message, according to this article in the Globe and Mail is heavily controlled, in an “unprecedented manner” citing former staffers of the Privy Council Office.
It doesn’t sound unprecedented to me. It sounds like the kind of control exerted in countries who don’t have democratic regimes. Harper got elected by saying his would be transparent government. It doesn’t seem to be transparent; it seems to be murky as hell. Why do they have to control so heavily. What is happening that we can’t know about? If we knew it, would we be calling for an election to throw them out?
No wonder they are spending one billion or so on security at the G20, when a few months ago it was three or four hundred million. They were spending too much time worrying about the 12,000 in Edmonton in the retirement home to pay attention.
And what does one billion in security buy anyway? Does anyone really know? Don’t expect an answer. It wouldn’t be on message.
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