I found out today that Americans are attacking Canadian values

Earlier today, I received an email from a Minnesotan friend, passing along information about an interesting series of events on campuses in Duluth being held in conjunction with Israeli Apartheid Week (March 1-7th). If I wasn't swamped with work and commitments up here in Thunder Bay and off to Fort Frances later in the week, I'd drive down to the US with my husband to hear the speakers (all who have been to Palestine), watch the films, and join the discussions. Please see the end of this post for the schedule and detail. I congratulate the organizers for arranging these crucial events to share information on the necessity of BDS to effect meaningful change for the Palestinians, which can then bring the prospect of peace to Israelis.

Having been heartened by the passion and justice of Duluth activists, you can imagine my dismay when I read tonight that the Ontario provincial government voted on a motion on Thursday, Feb. 25, to stop the use of the term "Israeli Apartheid":

The Ontario government recently approved a motion that the term "Israeli Apartheid" should not be used. The motion passed with unanimous support from the Ontario Tory's, Liberals and NDP.

I was shocked to see that the NDP supported this, so I immediately sent out an email to the local Member of Parliament (Federal) voicing my outrage about the provincial NDP's support on this (and I will post a Facebook message to the MPP).

My shock was compounded when I read in an Open Letter to Premier Dalton McGuinty and MPPs (who represent the Ontario populace) that this motion had passed with only 30 out of 107 MPPs in attendance. Hanna Kawas, Chairperson of the Canada Palestine Association in Vancouver, soundly critiques the moral bankruptcy of the reasoning behind this vote:

"I am a Palestinian Christian from the Palestinian city of Bethlehem who survived Israel’s “Original Sin” that uprooted two thirds of the Palestinian people and wiped out over four hundred Palestinian towns and villages from the map of the world in 1947/1948. I am also one of the six million refugees who have been waiting for the past sixty-one years to return to their homes, lands and homeland. I am hurt and outraged at the morally bankrupt resolution of your Legislature. It adds insult to injury.
I challenge any one or more from these “honourable members” of the Ontario Legislature who voted for the resolution to a reasonable and rational debate, at anytime.

In the meantime I just want to tell Mr. Shurman, please do NOT speak in the name of the South African people. In contrast to your unfounded assertion (with no proof) that the term Israeli Apartheid is “offensive to the millions of black South Africans”, let me offer you the facts. The South African peoples and leaders are not offended by the Apartheid comparison, they do support the Palestinian struggle for liberation and if anything is offensive to them, it is those who oppress the Palestinian people (the Israeli regime) and the unquestioning supporters of such ethnic cleansing and war crimes."

Then, reading an Israeli online newspaper, I read that the Ontario MPP who brought this motion to the Ontario government closely equates the term Israeli Apartheid with "hate speech" that could get you arrested and states that those who use it are "attacking Canadian values":

"If you're going to label Israel as Apartheid, then you are also... attacking Canadian values," Conservative legislator Peter Shurman told Shalom Life, a Toronto-based Jewish Web site.

"The use of the phrase 'Israeli Apartheid Week' is about as close to hate speech as one can get without being arrested, and I'm not certain it doesn't actually cross over that line," he said.

This all made me realize that my American justice-for-Palestine counterparts in Minnesota currently have more freedom of speech than I and millions of other Canadians in Ontario. I also realized with distress that my American colleagues against Israeli Apartheid, according to the Ontario government, are "attacking Canadian values." What sort of madness has this weekend's unjust Ontario parliamentary vote wrought?

Please see below for the Israeli Apartheid week events in Duluth, which I urge you to attend if you live in Minnesota:

--FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE--

A series of public events are planned next week at Duluth campuses to raise public awareness about human rights violations in historic Palestine and call for an end to U.S. support for Israel and for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. This includes a call for the State of Minnesota to divest itself of Israel bonds.

The events are being held in conjunction with the sixth annual Israel Apartheid Week, which takes place worldwide March 1-7, 2010. The local events are:

* Wednesday, March 3, 3 p.m., University of Wisconsin-Superior Old Main Room 310: Eyewitness Report from Egypt and Palestine: presentation by Sylvia Schwartz.
* Wednesday, March 3, 5 p.m., University of Minnesota-Duluth Montague Room 70: Eyewitness Reports from Egypt and Palestine: presentations by Bret Thiele, Mayra Gomez and Sylvia Schwartz.
* Thursday, March 4, 12:30 p.m., Lake Superior College Room E2046: Eyewitness Reports from Egypt and Palestine: presentations by Bret Thiele, Mayra Gomez and Sylvia Schwartz.
* Thursday, March 4, 5 p.m., College of St. Scholastica Intercultural Center (Tower Hall First Floor): Short Film on the Israeli Occupation, followed by a Panel Discussion with Bret Thiele, Mayra Gomez, and Sylvia Schwartz. Palestinian food provided by CSS Amnesty International.

The events are sponsored by the Minnesota Break the Bonds Coalition Duluth Chapter, College of St. Scholastica Amnesty International, and UMD Students for Peace.

chemical camisoles

Camisole: Not only a short light garment of soft delicate fabric worn by women when dressed in negligee for night or the bedroom, but also a straitjacket for lunatics in an asylum or criminals condemned to the guillotine.

One of the staggering things that Lisa Appignanesi says she discovered while doing research for her book Mad, Bad, and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors

"is that in 1800 or 1810, the head of Bedlam, the first great public mental health asylum in Britain had sixteen causes of mental illness, or thereabouts, and they were very general things, like misfortunes, troubles, grief, love, jealousy, pride, drink, intoxication, and -- I love this one, religion and Methodism. They were genuine causes. And now we have over 950 pages of very specific diagnoses, which seem to handle every aspect of lived experience, and a lot of them seem to have pharmaceuticals attributed to their potential cure. That's rather staggering ....

the mind-doctoring professions have really colonized our mental and emotional life, we have more and more things that are disordered, that are seen through those spectacles. We find more and more depression, where at one time we would have found unhappiness, or poverty, or any of a multitude of emotional and social problems. But we look to the mind doctors for their cures."

winter walk

A couple of weeks ago when I was in Fort Frances, I went for a morning walk along the shores of Rainy Lake. Where the lake empties into the Rainy River, an old Railway bridge (1908) crosses the narrows towards Minnesota, US. I stood on the Canadian side of Couchiching shore looking at the American Koochiching / International Falls to take this photo. I was amazed to see an open patch of water on the lakeside of the old bridge as this is the dead of winter. You can see the between space of liquid water and ice and snow through the puffs of wet air.

I walked through the snow at the disputed Pither's Point. The landscape had been covered in hoar frost during the night and we woke up to a white frost-laden wonderland. Besides 3 ducks that swam in the open expanse of water situated at the narrows, on the lakeside,

I heard two woodpeckers but could not see them.

The sound was coming from here.

If you stood real still at the shoreline you could hear a faint shushing sound of ice crystals sighing. Walking against the sun, narrowing my eyes against its brilliance,

I saw the air was filled with ice crystals, with small points of light dashing diagonally to meet me, and realized the sound was coming from the ice crystals as they set free from the trees.

Tilikum means friend

1971. Shamu at Sealand, a supposed publicity shot yet which captures animal resistance.

In the 70s, when I attended Hammarskjold High School, art was one of my favorite subjects, that is until I had a terribly sexist male teacher whose pedagogy was so problematic I stopped taking art because in order to continue with upper level art you had to have him for a teacher again. It was his class or no class, and his class was just so uncomfortable for a young insecure female, I stopped.

For another art instructor, who was not sexist but nice, I sketched a picture of an orca for my portfolio, but as he then asked me at the end of the year if he could keep all my work, and me being a terribly naive stupid young woman at the time, gave up all my work. So, I have nothing to show for my years in highschool art, I was too agreeable in those days, especially to male authority. The things I have learned....

Sometimes I wonder how life would be different if a young teenaged woman such as myself could have had some of the experience behind her of a middle-aged woman. Where were the older mentors? In those days, the media spin convinced us that anyone over 30 was old and not to be trusted. I viewed my mother not only as on the other side of the generation gap, but as an old-fashioned Finnish woman who had nothing in common with independent young Canadian women. What was I resisting or protesting in Port Arthur? Nothing. My parents' history and my identity, however, did not match. There was "over there" and here was "here" and how they fit, I was not even aware of, nor interested to think about. I was too busy being independent.


Cosmopolitan magazine cover February 1970

I did not have any political knowledge or social consciousness at all. I was supposed to be rebelling but against what I was not sure, but nonetheless I crafted a hippie wanna-be female identity that looked the part at least. I looked through the Seventeen magazines my sisters and I bought for examples on how to construct my identity--to guide me to feminine beauty in fear of the dreaded ugly-- and when feeling especially audacious and independent and thinking I needed to project a sexual image, Cosmopolitan magazine.

The media images from 1971 show that there is much need for young woman to be empowered by older women mentors who could guide them to better choices. Have women in the West advanced since the 70s? I think many of our hard won gains have been lost, stripped away, and indeed seen as superfluous and unnecessary. In Canada women have taken many steps backwards, thanks to our neo-conservative ruling government, and Canadian women's rights are in decline.

Too bad young Western women are not as apt to take up resistance strategies to their containment into social scripts as some animals are.

The YouTube clip above on Shamu, of course, is part of the story of Tilikum, the killer whale that recently killed a female trainer in Florida.

Yesterday when I posted the photo of the smiling dog, I actually had the death of the trainer at SeaWorld in mind. I was so troubled by her senseless and tragic death, but I couldn't help thinking: killer whale. The animal is called killer whale. Why do we continue to jail these massive predators in tanks for entertainment spectacle? This very problematic abuse and exploitation of killer whales, and opposition to that, has been going on ever since Western society realized what a cash cow killer whales are and set out to exploit their profit potential.

Jason Hribal, in his new book Fear of the Animal Planet: The History of Animal Resistance, makes the links between consuming animals as entertainment and capitalist profiteering clear:

Sea World, for instance, has had fifty-one Shamus. The original was captured in 1965, after animal collector Ted Griffin harpooned the calf’s mother in Puget Sound. Betting with the odds, Sea World would only lease the animal at first. Who knows how long she would last? But, when the young orca made it through the year, the park bought her outright for $100,000. Sea World made Shamu the central figure in its operations. All marketing from this point forward was geared towards her. There would be Shamu commercials. There would be Shamu shows. There would be Shamu dolls and t-shirts. Shamu became, in the words of one director, the park’s “Mickey Mouse.” This orca did, however, have the power to disrupt these well-laid plans.

In 1971, during a publicity stunt, Shamu was being filmed with bikini-clad women riding on her back. Suddenly, she tossed the woman off and began dunking the person underwater. There were two divers in the small pool, but Shamu shrugged them off like little insects. The chaotic scene continued for a few minutes: a hysterical woman, divers tumbling in the wake, and trainers at the poolside desperately holding out poles. The individual would, eventually, be rescued. But the deed was done and the images made the local news. Shamu, apparent to all, was not near as friendly or cooperative as the amusement park would have liked us to believe. Sea World had its first major incident. At the end of the day, though, the orca’s actions were not enough to bring down the park. Operations would continue and, fifty-one Shamus later, Sea World has thrived. It has become a flagship vacation destination with three current locations: San Diego, Orlando, and San Antonio. They have hotels, restaurants, roller coasters, merchandise, and special events. They have adventure camps for grade school and high school students. They have a multitude of animal exhibitions and performances. They have extensive breeding and research programs. Shamu has made Sea World’s owners very rich.

Killer whale (Orcinus Orca)

Our dog Bullet

My workload has been keeping me too busy, cramming too many things into a day, so when I come across something that makes me smile, well, it's just too precious to pass by. Like this pooch with a grin and bright friendly eyes. I know it's silly, but how sweet!

This little dog looks a bit like my bird, Sydney. I know it seems improbable, but there is something in the expression, something behind the eyes that reminds me of my lovebird.

This little dog reminded me of the Pomeranian mix that my sisters and I had when we were little until we were teens and even in our early twenties! I think she was about 17 years old when she died. Our dog, Bullet, who we named after Roy Roger's dog from his tv show popular in the 60s, was a joy to us. She went everywhere with us, scampering along the dirt roads of Jumbo Gardens when we started grade school, playing with us in the back lanes of Windemere Ave. when we moved into the city of Port Arthur, grooving with us to our first records in the basement of the Kenogami Ave home our dad built--what she thought of Donovan's LP Mellow Yellow or the 45 Louie, Louie by Paul Revere and the Raiders, one cannot say but she seemed to enjoy them!--and she followed along with us when we moved to Jenny Ketola's old green shiny wood house on Empress Ave, and finally to the last home our dad built on Oliver Road where her stone lies in the back bush somewhere.

I have not gone to visit her grave in a very long time. The woods may be completely overgrown, I fear. I don't think I'll find her grave. Last time my sister and I went to try to find her stone, we were thwarted by heavy branches of balsam and spruce. We tried to find where Isa had buried her but the branches were scratching our arms, the ground was soppy, boggy, and full of roots and sinkholes, and the mosquitoes were eating us alive. Our Isa used to keep the bush somewhat under check when he was alive (although he was more of the live-and-let-live philosophy, of the belief in unlandscaped natural beauty) , but since he passed no one has gone into the woods back of the house to do any clearing or pruning.