Category Archives: Peace

Peace

NDP Motion to Let War Resisters Stay Passes

According to an NDP news release:

An NDP motion calling on Stephen Harper’s Conservatives to allow Iraq war resisters to stay in Canada received strong support from Parliament this week. NDP Immigration Critic Olivia Chow is urging Harper to respect the will of regular Canadians who think George Bush’s war in Iraq is wrong and act immediately to ensure American war resisters are able to become permanent residents of Canada.


It’s nice to know Parliament supports this, but Harper will never, ever piss off his buddy George II by doing anything about it. It’s interesting that during the first Gulf War, Canada gave an Iraqi officer refugee status and permission to stay in Canada on the grounds that he was being forced to take part in an illegal war. Americans making the same claim in the second Iraq war were told to pack their bags and head back to Leavenworth. (Under Mr. Dithers’ Liberal government.)

Not In My Name

Today, for the first time in my life, I am deeply ashamed to be Canadian. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is publicly defending Israel’s destruction of Lebanon, so let me make one thing perfectly clear: he does not speak for me. (I sincerely hope he does not speak for most Canadians, but only time will tell.)

Any state which commits war crimes must be condemned in the strongest possible terms by all civilized nations. There are no excuses; no justifications; no rationalizations. There is no special dispensation for Israel (or America) which would permit it to systematically destroy nations, lives, and hopes in flagrant defiance of international law and common human decency. While I wish no ill on the people of Israel, they can freaking well defend their own actions without any moral cover from us.

flames >> /dev/null

A New Spirit?

Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

From Al Gore’s Martin Luther King Day address, via The Raw Story. One more teaser, then you’ll have to read the rest yourself.

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: “Men feared witches and burnt women.”

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same.

Happy Martin Luther King Day!