[antiwar-van] Canpalnet Statement - AN APPEAL FOR CALM AND IN DEFENCE OF DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS

[Ken]

Corrected Version of Canpalnet Statement 
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Canada Palestine Support Network
Burnaby British Columbia 

Honourable Paul Martin
Incoming Prime Minister of Canada
House of Commons

November 29, 2003

Dear Prime Minister:

Today marks the United Nations declaration of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Contrary to that spirit, this month the outgoing government, under the initiative of the Solicitor-General, added three more names to a list of proscribed organizations. This list has been compiled under the mandate of insufficiently discussed and hurriedly enacted "anti-terrorism" legislation.

The three additions this month are all Palestinian organizations, two of which are constituent elements of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, with whom the outgoing government has maintained diplomatic contact in Ottawa.

Regardless of this irony, the list as a whole and the new additions in particular do not advance in any practical way the physical security of the people of Canada. To the contrary, the secretive and arbitrary processes by which names are compiled under obvious political pressures fuel a culture of fear. This culture is inimical to and undermines democratic discussion and decision-making in this country.

On these grounds we protest the outgoing Solicitor-General's action.

We also have taken this occasion, coinciding with your imminent formal assumption of the duties of Prime Minister, to draft a statement reflecting on not only the most recent decisions of the outgoing Solicitor-General, but more broadly on a range of legislation and panoply of practices of which these recent decisions are but one integral part.

Among the many governmental issues you are reviewing, we urge you to include a review of the undemocratic path upon which the outgoing government embarked as its response to the terrorist attack on September 11th. Serious reconsideration, we trust, will lead you to reverse that direction.

We for our part shall continue to work broadly and publicly with others to see this change of direction becomes reality.


Sincerely,


Mordecai Briemberg
Canada Palestine Support Network
support at canpalnet.ca
www.canpalnet.ca 

AN APPEAL FOR CALM AND IN DEFENCE OF DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS

War has two fronts: abroad and at home. 

During World WarTwo the Prime Minister and government of Canada orchestrated a campaign of fear and racial targeting. Only many decades later was this publicly recognized as shameful.

All citizens and immigrants of Japanese heritage were treated as the "enemy within". In that manipulated climate of fear, people were dispossessed of their belongings, removed from their residences, transported and imprisoned without conviction of any criminal act.

During the "cold war" Canada had its homespun version of McCarthyism. People were labeled the "enemy within" and again their rights to employment, expression, organization and other freedoms were denied, again without trial or conviction of criminal acts.

Today our government once more takes us down these worn paths. "Terrorist" is the current equivalent of "Jap" and "Commie", the catch-all label to justify the current campaign of fear mongering, racial profiling, persecution and the ill-considered and hurried passage of anti-democratic legislation, under our homespun version of the Bush administration's "Patriot Act".

When terrorists exploded the Air India flight, our government thankfully did not introduce "special" anti-terrorism legislation, did not manufacture a climate of fear, did not racially profile citizens and immigrants of Punjabi heritage, did not target and persecute them as an "enemy within".

Instead, it treated the bombing as a criminal act, a matter for police investigation, legal prosecution under existing criminal law, through the process of an open trial, with the accused having access to the evidence against them, and a judge and jury having the right and the responsibility to determine guilt or innocence.

Three Prime Ministers of Israel (Begin, Shamir and Barak) have belonged to and participated in organizations that perpetrated acts of terror - bombings and assassinations. The current Prime Minister of Israel stands accused by an Israeli government appointed commission of complicity in crimes against humanity. 

Thankfully again, our government has not responded by defining Canadian citizens and immigrants of Jewish heritage as an "enemy within".

Yet, when it comes today to Canadian citizens, immigrants and refugees of Arab heritage, of Muslim faith, of a "certain" stereotypical skin complexion and "appearance", there is a campaign of fear-mongering. They are treated as the "enemy within", the "terrorists" who are targeted to relive the shameful abuses of the Canadian past.

Their communities are terrified by the manufactured climate of fear and targeting; their expression of opinion is silenced; their sympathies with struggles abroad for internationally recognized national, democratic and human rights are suppressed; their rights in this country to face precise accusations in criminal court, with open procedures, access to evidence, are denied.

As others in the Canadian past stood up to oppose the persecution of their fellow residents in this country, we stand up today. Regardless of whether we are few or many, we are not willing to wait for decades for an apology that is no real remedy. 

Let us stop going down this too well-worn path.

As more and more Canadians, along with more and more people in the U.S., the U.K. and other countries now recognize: U.S. war-making and empire building before, and particularly after 9/11, has put the lives of ordinary people in our countries more at risk. The wars abroad with their massacres of ordinary Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians and others, are the infrastructure that fuels terrorism. And the synchronous war at home fuels paranoia, sweeps away reasoned discussion, and reduces everyone's democratic rights. 

Ordinary people lose on both fronts. 

We are glad to be in the company of those Canadians who spoke out when our homespun version of the US Patriot Act was hurriedly passed after 9/11. These people -- lawyers, unionists, civil libertarians, democrats of different politics -- recognized the truth, so familiar in quotation but so much less so in action, penned by the German reverend, Martin Niemoller. 'When they came for the communists, I wasn't a communist, so I didn't protest. When they came for the Jews, I wasn't a Jew, so I didn't protest. When they came for . and when they came for . and when they came for me, there was no one left to protest.'

Niemoller's nemesis, the Nazi Hermann Goering, while awaiting the Nurenberg trial for his war crimes, explained to a prison psychiatrist: "Why, of course the people don't want war. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship . That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

We encourage those who spoke out before to persist in doing so, and we encourage others to join in opposing: arrests without charges, trials with secret evidence, racial profiling, deporting of refugees at risk of persecution, torture and death, two-tiered citizenship rights, the construction of lists of proscribed organizations, and all anti-democratic measures that are a product of this intensifying, fear-mongering campaign of war-on-the-home-front. 

In our own and everyone's shared interest, we oppose these with the same vigour as we oppose war-making abroad. 

War abroad and war at home bring neither peace nor freedom. Quite the contrary.

As an elderly Italian man sighed, paying his respect to the Italian soldiers killed in Iraq, their bodies lying in-state: "So much death . and for nothing."

Canada Palestine Support Network

November 29, 2003
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