Stephen Taylor - a blog on Canadian politics |
A SENIOR official at Amnesty International has accused the charity of putting the human rights of Al-Qaeda terror suspects above those of their victims.
Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at Amnesty’s international secretariat, believes that collaborating with Moazzam Begg, a former British inmate at Guantanamo Bay, “fundamentally damages” the organisation’s reputation.
In an email sent to Amnesty’s top bosses, she suggests the charity has mistakenly allied itself with Begg and his “jihadi” group, Cageprisoners, out of fear of being branded racist and Islamophobic.
Sahgal describes Begg as “Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban”. He has championed the rights of jailed Al-Qaeda members and hate preachers, including Anwar al-Awlaki, the alleged spiritual mentor of the Christmas Day Detroit plane bomber.
Amnesty’s work with Cageprisoners took it to Downing Street last month to demand the closure of Guantanamo Bay. Begg has also embarked on a European tour, hosted by Amnesty, urging countries to offer safe haven to Guantanamo detainees. This is despite concerns about former inmates returning to terrorism.
Sahgal, who has researched religious fundamentalism for 20 years, has decided to go public because she feels Amnesty has ignored her warnings for the past two years about the involvement of Begg in the charity’s Counter Terror With Justice campaign.
“I believe the campaign fundamentally damages Amnesty International’s integrity and, more importantly, constitutes a threat to human rights,” Sahgal wrote in an email to the organisation’s leaders on January 30. “To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment.”
Looking for work? Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, a federal government agency, is recruiting a research assistant at their Saint-Hyacinthe, Qu. location. Salary is listed as $52,225 to $63,538, and French is essential. If you're interested, submit your application by December 3.
And when you do, make sure you get your ethnicity straight. That's because, like all government agencies, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada "is committed to achieving a skilled, diversified workforce that reflects the diversity of the Canadian population. We encourage members of the following employment equity groups to apply and self-identify: women (especially in non-traditional occupational groups), members of a visible minority group, aboriginal people, and persons with a disability."
"Self-identify" is, of course, a euphemism for "Don't forget to cash in on your DNA." Decades after traditional forms of discrimination were banned from Canadian workplaces, our own government continues to boast that it judges people by the colour of their skin and the nature of their sex organs.
...and a subject on which everyone is an expert.
On human rights
In an absolutely brilliant column in Maclean’s, Barbara Amiel supports Elton John’s and David Furnish’s attempt to adopt an HIV-positive infant from Ukraine — whose government will have none of it — and attacks the sort of columnists who abhor proposed familial relationships in the abstract without paying “the slightest attention to the child.” Easily the best thing we’ve ever read from Amiel.
Nearer the back of the same issue, you’ll find a terrific column from Mark Steyn, who notes the case of a canine-allergic Ottawa-area B&B owner dragged before the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal for refusing accommodations to a blind man and his dog. It’s all very well for purported human rights supporters to go after folks like Steyn and Ezra Levant, he argues — i.e., people who seek and enjoy the limelight. But mightn’t they spare a thought for the folks, like the poor B&B owner, just trying to “keep their heads down and make a living”?
"The US Senate Judiciary committee is now considering the so-called Hate Crimes Prevention Act passed by the House April 29, under the sponsorship of Rep John Conyers (D-MI) and 120 other Representatives. Dubbed the ”Thought Crimes Prevention Act” by some House Republicans, HB1913 includes pedophilia as a protected sexual orientation.
Prior to approval by the whole House, a party-line 10-13 vote of Conyers’ House Judiciary Committee April 23 rejected a proposal by Republican Rep Steve King (R-IA) “to define the term `sexual orientation’ as used in the bill to explicitly exclude pedophilia.” Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin, an open lesbian, called the amendment, “unnecessary and inflammatory.”
When judges are required to interpret any Act resulting from passage of HB1913, they will refer to this vote and see that the intent of the lawmakers was to protect pedophiles. This could lead to federal felony prosecutions against anyone who acts to expel a pedophile from his neighborhood. Federal felony convictions require a minimum one year incarceration in a federal penitentiary.
Source
(18) Eight a.m. in Kabul looks and feels a lot like 8 a.m. in Toronto, mothers accompanying their children to the school gates, older siblings clutching the hands of small brothers and sisters.
Even the capital's chaotic traffic slows down to take care around youngsters.
Other kids, as young as 7 and 8, push wheelbarrows full of produce or pedal along with ancient samovars attached to their bikes, serving glasses of tea to pedestrians.
Pressed early into labour as family wage-earners, they can only look longingly at students so visibly and busily engaged in the process of learning.
Nobody knows what kind of future is in store for Afghanistan's children, what the country will be like by the time they're grown.
Maybe it's all a false premise – no jobs, no opportunities and, if some form of Taliban regime forces itself back into power, certainly no education for females. They'll be shoved back into their homes – even though women have become since 2002 the primary income earners in many households – with only widows clad in ragged burqas allowed onto the streets in order to beg.
The pathologically misogynistic Taliban did allow that much during their wretched reign.
Unfortunately, girls attending school is an increasingly rare sight in the volatile southern provinces where the Taliban is snatching back terrain and imposing martial authority. Schools have been built by donor countries and burned to the ground by insurgents. And while the central government boasts of new learning institutions opening all the time, many of these "academies" are open-air facilities, with lessons taught under a canvas awning.
How very brave teachers are in Kandahar and Helmand and Uruzgan, threatened with night letters, shot, throats slit, yet many still defying the risks. We can all take a lesson in courage from them.
But it is understandable that fewer parents will expose their daughters to the dangers of a walk to school. An insurgency that squirts acid into the faces of schoolgirls – 15 students and female teachers dreadfully scarred in such incidents over the past month – has lost any veneer of legitimacy. They terrorize and brutalize, striking at the softest of targets.
There may be such a thing as a "moderate Taliban" but this is largely the fantasy notion of Westerners suffering from Afghan-fatigue, naively hopeful of an exit resolution. Experts on the ground interviewed by the Star in recent days say the Taliban is more than ever – more even than pre-2001 – intertwined with and answerable to Al Qaeda, converging again in Pashtun southern Afghanistan, ejected from Iraq by American troops and Sunni tribal leaders.
We are back at the beginning, making the same mistakes, with an Afghan government that thinks it can hang onto power by negotiating with the Taliban. This is folly.
With presidential elections scheduled for next year and his domestic popularity plunging, Hamid Karzai is desperate for Pashtun support. He seems now willing to make any deal with the devil to retain the power invested in him by America and secured – insofar as it is – by the blood of Western troops. This week, hosting a UN Security Council delegation, Karzai even called for a timeline to end the war. "If there is no deadline, we have the right to find another solution for peace and security, which is negotiations."
Karzai is a desperate man with no daughters.
We all know what a made-in-Afghanistan solution looks like. Females aren't part of it.
November 25, 2008 was a momentous day for opponents of Canada’s creeping march towards liberal fascism. A week after administrators at one of our most prestigious post-secondary institutions, Queens University, sent a gang of thought police out to campus cafeterias and lounges to eavesdrop on private conversations, the long-awaited Moon Report on the future of the Canada Human Rights Commission was released to the public (read the full report here). Despite the fact that the Commission’s own leader hand-picked the report’s left-leaning law professor writer, and paid him handsomely with Commission funds, Prof. Richard Moon made explicit in no uncertain terms in his report: the now world-famous Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act must be repealed! (More details in op-eds from Ezra Levant and the National Post Editorial Board).
Amazingly, the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s chairwoman Jennifer Lynch, seems ready to throw the report down the memory hole, and start again in her attempt to whitewash the fascism of Section 13 and preserve the legal activist community’s make-work racket. In this context, it’s not hard to understand why Canada’s “official Jews” (a term coined by Levant that I have gratefully adopted) continue to wage battle against those who wish to strip the Human Rights Act of its most heavy-handed powers of summary execution. Here’s the official response of Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress - an organization that clearly has the interests of lawyers and leftists, rather than Jews as a whole, at heart. Typical response of liberals to failure - double-down on the rejected policy, and blame the problems on “poor implementation” (reminiscent of Barack Obama’s upcoming return to the New Deal in America).
Farber may be the most egregious proponent of Section 13, but he’s not alone. Leo Adler, head of the Canadian branch of Rabbi Marvin Hier’s excellent L.A.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, has tarnished his organization through vocal support. The B’nai Brith, a Jewish community and charitable organization to which I belong, has also supported the draconian speech code law. I’ll be following Levant, and doing what I can to hit these organizations in the pocketbook. I will be doing my best to participate in his “Jews against book burning” campaign, and ensure that no donated funds of mine will go to the CJC or Friends of Simon Wiesenthal (who is probably turning in his grave at Adler’s antics) until their policies change.
In the meantime, I look forward to the law’s repeal in Parliament. Get it on the agenda, Mr. Harper!
Modify HRC Jurisdiction
PROPOSED BY VICTORIA AND KELOWNA - LAKE COUNTRY
iii) The Conservative Party supports legislation to remove authority from the Canadian Human Rights Commission and Tribunal to regulate, receive, investigate or adjudicate complaints related to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
This will be read out at the Conservative Party convention this week. And as the delegates and conventioneers file into the convention, they will receive our pamphlet.
This pamphlet was created by Canada’s free speech cabal, that group hated by the left. A copy will be faxed and/or emailed to every MP in Canada.
Lefties hate me, and the feeling is mutual. However, I will defend their right to be assholes. Only a select few have said the same in reverse.
Posted by: Right Girl
CBS News |
Ready to address human rights violations with China yet, Mr Byers?
Those playing close enough attention to what passes for foreign policy debate in Canada may be aware of the rhetoric that is Michael Byers' specialty.
Byers has accused Canada's Conservative government of undermining Canada's role in the world -- or at least what he thinks should be Canada's role in the world. "Stephen Harper has been a disaster for Canadian foreign policy on almost every front," Byers said last year. "It's partly because he doesn't understand the issues, but it's also partly because he doesn't think–or he doesn't want to think–that Canada can play an independent role."
Read the rest of the posting......thanks to Patrick Ross
The Harper government's attempt to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act by removing section 67, which exempts the Indian Act from provisions in human rights legislation, has run into some roadblocks. The opposition parties have blocked an attempt by the government to move the legislation through committee, demanding instead that the government consult more broadly with First Nations communities. What's all the fuss about?
The Canadian Human Rights Act, including section 67, was enacted in 1977. Among other things, it prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, marital status and sex. Under the Indian Act at that time, women who married non-Indians lost their status while Indian men who married non-Indians not only retained theirs but their non-Indian wives were granted Indian status as well.
Having been chastised by the UN Human Rights Committee for violating Indian women's human rights, the Canadian government put section 67 in the new human rights legislation as a temporary measure, a way for the government to stop further complaints from Indian women while it consulted with First Nations peoples. But "temporary" turned out to be indefinite. Section 67 is still there.
