The Toronto Star abetting the defense of violent scum?

Read this post at GenuineWitty to see what one Toronto Star writer has been up to.

Toronto Star's Zerb lauds violent anarchist criminal halfwit - gee, who'd have thunk that?

Let’s begin with the title where she labels Hiscocks a “G20 Activist”. To label Hiscocks as an activist is to insult all of the people who do hard work to make change in this world. She was convicted for the same activities as Alex Hundert- training people to damage buildings and stores in downtown Toronto, and how to ‘de-arrest’ people from the police. The word for what Hiscocks did was ‘criminal’, not ‘activist’.     

Next, without questioning her poor logic, Zerbisias explains Hiscock’s complaint how she was unfairly put into maximum security without any sort of an explanation why. Are they kidding? Hiscocks was put into maximum security because she’s an evangelist for promoting violence and chaos on the streets of Toronto. It’s quite simple really- your average Grade Five student could understand this.    

Hiscocks crossed a serious line by teaching and encouraging kids to ‘de-arrest’ each other- a violent act by its definition.  She put a lot of young and impressionable kids at risk. She’s is in her late 30′s, the people she was training were often just out of high school. Encouraging younger people to getting into physical confrontations with the police is the height of irresponsibility.

Today's Top 10: You're probably an idiot if...

10.  You think Naomi Klein is brilliant

9.   You think the Occupy Movement's message will affect real global change

8.   You think the Occupy Movement had a message

7.   You have a home subscription to The Toronto Star

6.   You think the Arab Spring has brought social justice and democracy to the Arab middle east

5.   You think Canada needs an Arab Spring

4.   You want to ban Jews from teaching in schools but call other people "Nazis"

3.   You're still fighting for abortion rights more than two decades after that battle has been won.

2.   You're still fighting against the Viet Nam War more than three decades after that war ended.

1.   You're married to Naomi Klein.

One person can make a difference

Mainstream media gives some rather unintelligent and hopelessly biased people the credibility that accompanies a public platform.

Nowhere is this concern more evident than in the distorted coverage of matters relating to Israel. Just one example of a source of that phenomenon is The Toronto Star, whose anti-Israel editorial bias is so pronounced that it has earned that newspaper the nickname "al-Starzeera."

It publishes Haroon Siddiqui, who until recent complaints and public demonstrations caused a slight retreat, produced a column whose only seeming purpose was to find an excuse to vilify Israel. It' provides print space to Linda McQuaig, a hopelessly biased polemicist of who notoriously likened Israel's killing of 9 armed jihadis who expressed a desire for martyrdom on the Mavi Marmara to the murder of an innocent Jewish American by Palestinian terrorists on the Achile Lauro.

For years, it even allowed the  archaic, irrelevant Antonia Zerbisias to use the Star's Living section to defend Hamas and routinely condemn Israel and get the main points of her stories wrong in the process. And of course there are countless examples of daily mistruths and distortions from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Globe and Mail and other Canadian media outlets.

For the most part, when informed people hear of such things, they shake their heads in disappointment, maybe write a letter to the Editor, and worry about the dumbing-down of Canadian media. There are prominent organizations who do excellent work in holding the media to account, such as the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, but they have a number of areas of focus.

There is, however, an individual who has made anti-Israel bias in the Canadian media his sole mission, and he's doing an incredible job on his own, with just a few volunteers and a group of committed financial supporters. His name is Mike Fegelman and he's been vigilant in monitoring media and exposing the slander and hate that is directed towards the Jewish state by some of the members of Canada's media establishment.

Through Honest Reporting Canada, Mike has most recently drawn attention to the anti-Semitic TV host Stéphane Gendron, who in the past said that Jews  "invented terrorism." Now Gendron is accusing Israel of planing to bulldoze and kill Palestinians, and Honest Reporting Canada is holding him and the Quebec's V Network, that broadcasts such bigotry, to account.

Mike put on an interesting event with Mark Dubowitz last week. Dubowitz is the Executive Director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank. It was fascinating to hear his assessment that he hopes and expects President Obama's policies of containing Iran through sanctions and covert action to prevent them from acquiring a nuclear weapon will be successful. Most of the audience were less optimistic and felt that military strikes on Iran are both necessary and inevitable. Israel's threats of attack are seen in that context, not so much as a genuine threat as the stick to induce countries like China and Russia to accept the carrot of serious sanctions.

Honest Reporting Canada is doing fine work and you can learn more about it here.

Rick Salutin returns to a major daily newspaper.. and no one notices

The Looney Left went crazy a few months ago when the Globe and Mail replaced Rick Salutin's column with one from Irshad Manji.

"A blow to "progressive" (read: regressive) voices in the media" was the gist of their shrill cries. As of last Friday, Salutin has been writing for The Toronto Star. His first column for the Liberal-leaning paper was ostensibly a review of a TV series called NCIS, but Salutin being Salutin, it was filled with undertones about the evils of the United States.

One would think all those people who decried Salutin's firing from the Globe would be cheering his return with great fanfare.

But such was not the case. In the 3 days since his article was published online, it managed to draw only 3 user comments and virtually no attention.

Maybe it's because in the Globe, his column stood out. Whereas in the Star, among raving fanatics like Linda McQuaig, Haroon Siddiqui, Antonia Zerbisias, and James Travers, Salutin gets lost in the crowd. In fact, he seems relatively sane compared to his new colleagues, particularly when considering that Heather Mallick is one of them.

University of Toronto academics (and Linda McQuaig) angered by $35 million dollar donation

One would think that when an entrepreneur and philanthropist donates $35 million dollars to a public university for the purpose of establishing a top caliber school of Global Affairs, there would be cheering from people ostensibly interested in improving education and enhancing the debate about international issues.

But at the University of Toronto, it appears there are some staff members and their acolytes who are deeply troubled at the prospect of students being given a well-rounded education that strays from their "approved doctrines."

Peter Munk is the founder of Barrick Gold is one of Toronto's foremost philanthropists. His $35 million dollar donation to the University of Toronto to establish the Munk School of Global Affairs was intended to give U of T a program that could rival those at Stanford and Oxford universities. The purpose is to facilitate the experience and knowledge of students who can think critically and enable to them to engage with a variety of ideas and perspectives in order to contribute to addressing compelling world issues.

Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, as recent experience at U of T demonstrates, there are some academics at that institution who do not appear to be able to differentiate between critical thought and indoctrination. Their own views suggest that they are afraid that any thought that disputes their own should be suppressed and they object to Munk's donation to the university, ostensibly on the grounds that this is part of the "corporatization" of academia and that Munk may have "influence" on the curriculum.

It must be appalling for professors like Paul Hamel and John Valleau, and someone with the absence of a moral compass such as Linda McQuaig to think that anything other than Marxist perspective could inform political theory at U of T. The Munk School of Global Affairs is headed by Janice Gross Stein, who is as fair-minded and non-ideological as one could hope for in a teacher.

To give an indication of Munk's commitment to the open exchange of ideas, you only need look as far as the Munk Debates series he sponsors.

The Munk Debates have brought together people of diametrically opposing views to provide public exchange of ideas in which people can balance proposals and engage in something OISE students aren't exposed to: critical thought. The debates have been on subjects such as The Canadian vs US health care systems, whether religion is a force for good, climate change, humanitarian aid and more. Participants have included people with such varied outlooks as Stephen Lewis, Christopher Hitchens, Charles Krauthammer, Mia Farrow, Tony Blair, John Bolton, Gareth Evans and so on.

At the Blair/Hitchens debate, I met some Munk School students and they were thoughtful, balanced, intelligent people who were open to a variety of ideas.

Which is exactly what seems to bother McQuaig and the opponents of the donation and the Munk School of Global Affairs. Under the guise of wanting "critical thought," they seemingly want students to be able to have one type of thought and to be critical of anything that digresses from it. That could be called many things, but "critical thought" it ain't.

There are a lot of things I could write to make fun of the ideologues opposed Munk's donation and to ideas that contradict theirs. But nothing does the job better than this piece of news: The Toronto Star's blogger, Antonia Zerbisias, who without explanation backed out of being a featured speaker at the mini-hate fest earlier this week, is going to enthusiastically attend a full day of anti-Munk protest this Saturday.

Feeling More Marginalized: Looney left goes crazy over Irshad Manji replacing Salutin at The Globe

Canadian “progressives” infuriated by the replacement of a privileged white male with a gay Muslim woman-of-color

Let Freedom Rain's Jymm Parrett originally titled his post  "Globe and Mail replaces Rick Salutin with piece of shit"  but after being taken to task by one of his own readers, calmed down slightly and changed the title to the more straightforward, if grammatically incomplete, " Globe and Mail replaces Rick Salutin Irshad Manji"

However the prose lost none of its demented color with:

Irshad Manji is a clueless bore of an ideologue who is the leading edge of the new Globe & Mail campaign to out fox Fox News. Forget Kory and his TV dreams. This is much worse. The Mop & Pail has flown the coop.

(it goes on, getting better ..or worse, here .. and here )


"Eugene Forsey Liberal" offers:

I beg of you Globe, stop this folly. The world needs less Manjis, Teneyckes, Lavignes, etc., and more brains, more originality, more wit, more insight, uh, like...hmm, who again? Ah yes, Salutin!

"Orwell's Bastard"  gives us:

At a time when the reinvigoration of civil discourse is more important than ever, why in god's name is the Globe jettisoning its most thoughtful, original and engaging columnist? Are focus groups and demographic targeting and tokenism more important to Canada's self-appointed National Newspaper than raising the tone of the national conversation? Sadly, the answer seems to be yes.

In losing Rick Salutin's voice, the Globe isn't just getting rid of a genuinely original and progressive thinker. It's abandoning the whole notion of intellectual curiosity, leaving us with hacks like Blatchford and Wente.

Antonia Zerbisias, in her usual exhibiton of unintentional radical leftist self-parody, characterizes Manji's efforts to reform and liberalize the form of orthodox Islam that imposes the Niqab and condones suicide bombings as "Muslim bashing."


If there was a prize for idiotic interpretations of this event, it might go to David Beers at the tyee.ca who wrote:

Why did The Globe and Mail fire Rick Salutin? Without a better answer from the newspaper's brass, we're left to read Salutin's last two columns and ponder how power behaves when the politics of fear, and those who wield them deftly, are ascendant.

The two columns Beers refers to were critical respectively, of Stephen Harper and Rob Ford. If that were grounds for dismissal at the Globe, they would have no one left on staff but Christie Blatchford. But for Beers to know that, he would have to actually read The Globe and Mail.


What's behind the hysterics, of course, is that the old-school radical left realize that they are being regarded as less and less relevant to public discourse. In the US, Barack Obama knows he can ignore them or take them for granted, depending on the circumstance.

Salutin in the Globe was the way that these people could delude themselves into thinking their voice was being taken seriously. Propping a corpse up and putting it into a chair doesn't make it a living person. The Globe finally decided it was time to bury the corpse.

UPDATE: Manji's first column as a regular Globe columnist. An interesting and balanced discussion about the Tea Party's growing popularity and its Canadian applications.

The usual suspects  (see above)  have flocked to the online comments section to say how awful they think she is. With their usual deficit of irony, some claim they will permanently abandon the Globe because of its replacement of Salutin with Manji, then return two hours later to post another disparaging comment.

Persichilli: One of the few voices of sanity at al-Starzeera

There's one columnist at al-Starzeera whom I haven't mentioned previously in this blog and I regret that.

Partially, it's because his column only appears once a week on Sundays and the other reason is that his main gig is as political editor of the Italian-Canadian newspaper Corriere Canadese, so I don't think of him so much as being a Star columnist.

But he is and he deserves mention, because he is one of the few editorial anomalies in the organization that gives a forum to the habitually uninformed hysteria of James Travers, Heather Mallick, Haroon Siddiqui, Christopher Hume, Antonia Zerbisias, Linda McQuaig, et cetera.

There are a couple of others, like Martin Regg Cohn, to be sure, but they are the rare exceptions in that organization.

Angelo Persichilli's column are routinely informative, insightful and he actually has the connections in Ottawa and the Liberal Party to be able to report based on credible information rather than wild, paranoid speculation.

Today he wrote a column about what Rob Ford's candidacy represents that has shown a level of insight and maturity that reminded me how out of place he is at The Toronto Star.  I don't agree with Persichilli about his notion of bike lanes being such a representation of the urban/suburban and elitist/public divide. If that were the case than Rocco Rossi wouldn't be the last-place candidate with single digit polling numbers. But basically, Persichilli nails it:

Rob Ford is neither a candidate to fear nor a political phenomenon. He is only an individual who is in the right place at the right time. The Oct. 25 vote is not about Ford, it’s a referendum on outgoing Mayor David Miller and his cronies.

This campaign is about four things: the repudiation of Miller’s vision of Toronto; the revolt of the suburban “colonies”; the frustration of people in the downtown core; and the inability of the other candidates to understand the first three of these factors.

Miller thinks that his Toronto is the real Canada. He’s wrong. Miller’s Toronto it’s only a distillation of this complex country seen through magnifying, distorting glasses. His Toronto is a concentration of Canadian virtues and imperfections, blown up and stuffed together into a few square kilometres around city hall.

There we have the best museums, art galleries and universities, but also a lot of ignorance just a few hundred metres away from those institutions. There are religious icons like St. Michael’s Cathedral, but also in the same street many organizations that are challenging Catholic doctrine. You find the opulent banks at Bay and King, but also food banks around the corner. There are the beautiful houses of the Rosedale enclave, but also a lot of homeless people. There are expensive and fancy cars, but also people who cannot even afford the TTC.

Miller didn’t deal with any of these contradictions. He made them worse by promoting petty projects like bike lanes that were sold as a social revolution, an environmental game-changer. His approach to government has been much like the behaviour of rich socialites who pollute the environment with their SUVs and private planes or sully the lakes in Muskoka with their powerboats and then engage in petty projects such as sending their children to volunteer at the food bank or to some camp in a Third World country for a photo-op to fabricate a social conscience.

Miller’s administration is identified with traffic jams that are fouling the environment; a “special relationship” with the unions and friendly, costly contractors; the garbage strike, which exposed his lack of leadership; waste; tax increases and, most of all, the typical in-your-face attitude of a messiah who thinks he can disregard the opinions of his ignorant subjects.

Read the rest of his column here.

An interesting addendum to Carolyn Bennett's policy clarification courtesy of Dr. Dawg and Antonia Zerbisias

Check out the updates at the end of this post to see strange interpretations placed on straightforward events by a pair of prominent members of The Looney Left.

UPDATE: The story also made Macleans online. The user comments overwhelmingly reflect the idea that people respect a politician who owns up to a mistake and corrects it. The public is behind you on this, with the exception of a couple of people (see above) who are still mired in an acid flashback of 1960's radicalism.

The Inside Scoop on Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett's hard lesson on tweeting

Due disclosure.

I like Carolyn Bennett and a friend of mine is one of her assistants.

I don't agree with her about everything. For example, we have different opinions on the Iraq war. Mine are more like Christopher Hitchens' and hers are like Michael Ignatieff's are now (as opposed to Michael Ignatieff's before he decided he wanted to be Prime Minister, when he too agreed with Hitchens).

But Carolyn is a good MP, a devoted public servant, is accessible and we share enough views that I am comfortable in supporting her.

Today, she tweeted an article from rabble.ca about Stephen Harper's appearance at the UN. Followers of this blog know my opinion about rabble.ca, which I usually refer to as being a Marxist mouthpiece and a collection of some of the least intelligent minds in this country who lend their support to a number of particularly odious causes.

Usually when a public figure tweets something with a description of it being "interesting," it can conceivably be taken as some sort of endorsement. The article by Derrick O'Keefe, contained rabble's typically simple-minded, extreme bias against Israel:

Canada under Stephen Harper has been called “Israel’s best friend,” even as that state has grown ever more aggressive in violating international law to maintain its occupation and collective punishment against the Palestinian people. Fittingly, Israeli PM Netanyahu was visiting Ottawa in May when Israeli forces massacred nine members of an international aid flotilla seeking to break the siege of Gaza. The Harper government took the lead in enforcing the siege, backed Israel’s brutal military assault on Gaza, and has taken steps towards criminalizing and suppressing criticism of the state of Israel. .. -War. But then Harper’s unstinting support for Israel is consistent with his sympathy for war and illegal occupation more generally -

Needless to say, I was very surprised. Carolyn has always been a strong supporter of Israel, but people have been known to change their positions (see Michael Ignatieff above).  I tweeted this back to Carolyn:

I hoped the answer would be "no" and was gratified to see I was correct in her subsequent tweet:

I thought this was an informative lesson on the dangers of politicians using social media without being fully aware of its implications and through my friend, contacted Carolyn to get her version of events.

Of course, Carolyn remains a strong supporter of Israel and her mistake was in not reading the article carefully and not being familiar enough with its dubious source or author. Another part, naturally is that partisanship tends to make politicians jump a little too easily at opportunities to attack the other side, and the people who hate Stephen Harper in this country have not done themselves any favours by acting rashly and aligning themselves with some nefarious characters.

Carolyn asked what I would suggest she do under the circumstances to clarify matters and make sure that no one misconstrues what happened. I suggested two things. The first is to get ahead of the game and make a statement herself telling the truth about what happened. Everyone makes mistakes. And she hadn't done anything wrong. It would only be a problem if it were misinterpreted.

But it's best to talk about it yourself than to wait for someone else to come across it and do just that.

The second piece of advice was to be very careful in the future about sources she use or allow herself to be associated with. rabble.ca is about to the left what the KKK is to the right, and neither is something a credible person would want to be associated with.

Carolyn took my advice and promptly posted this to her blog:

Hard lesson today on retweeting


Posted on 23. Sep, 2010 in Media


A friend sent me a link to a Rabble.ca article on Stephen Harper’s speech at the UN. I didn’t agree with the premise that Canada didn’t deserve a seat on the Security Council, but I thought the the record on indigenous people, global warming, Aid, Khadr was worth sharing .. I retweeted with the word ‘interesting’ … I was shocked to be tweeted back asking if I supported the anti-israel rhetoric in the article. I went back to the article and was upset to realize that the article I bhad read on my berry had truncated and that I hadn’t read the last paragraphs before I retweeted the article. This is a serious lesson for me. I am thankful how quickly the error was pointed out to me and that I was able to reply that in no way did I support the anti-Israel message. As I hadn’t really agreed with the premise of the article I had used the word ‘interesting’ on purpose. But I now realize that as an MP if I cite an article it can be interpreted as ‘promoting’ it or worse yet that I agree with every word. In the future I promise to be more careful and to make clearer my support or lack of support for the opinions being put forth in the ‘link’. Mea culpa. It has also been pointed out to me that I should be wary of certain publications, authors as an initial screen. I will do better in the future. I learn a great deal using social media tools… The information, the frank feedback are all part of a learning culture and a ‘democracy between elections’ in which citizens and their elected representatives can interact in real time. I take this responsibility seriously. I apologize for today’s error.

 
Her post has already been picked up on Canada.com
 
All's well that ends well.. just another day in the blogosphere...

UPDATE: Looney Tune al-Starzeera columnist Antonia Zerbisias, whose pathological hatred of Israel led her to write defenses of Hamas in The Toronto Star's Living section until she was canned from that gig, is shocked and saddened that Bennett would apologize for inadvertently tweeting the anti-Israel rabble.ca tripe (which the Zerb no doubt endorses in all regards).



You can't get much better confirmation than that. When the Zerb doesn't like something, it's almost certainly the right thing to do.

UPDATE 2: Less-than-brilliant blogger Dr. Dawg saw Carolyn's clarification and attributes it to the evil Israel lobby and a big conspiracy! Wow, I didn't know a tweet from me was so important. According to paranoid nitwit Dawg, I am "the spinning blades of the pro-Israel lobby."


Thanks Dawg, now I really feel powerful! I left him a comment in gratitude.

it may not have occurred to you, Dawg, but Carolyn has been a consistently strong supporter of Israel, and upon confirming the full text of the article, she wanted to make it clear that she didn't want to be associated with the idiotic views expressed about it.

Quite commendable, really, on her part.

Your position is clear, you want to label Israel as an "apartheid" country, although you really should invest in a dictionary before you continue with that. Apartheid doesn't usually allow for racial integration and full enfranchisement, but what's a few facts here or there?

You might want to look into the Palestinian law that proscribes the death penalty for anyone selling land to Jews and see where that fits into your apartheid concepts, or can we assume that's just fine with you?

Imagine.. a parliamentarian wants to make sure that her position on an issue isn't misconstrued, and since you don't like that position, it must be part of some conspiracy. Suffering from a little LDS yourself, it seems.

And by the way, I'm the one who alerted Carolyn to the full content of the article. We had a nice conversation in which I suggested to her that rabble is not the sort of publication that lends itself to credibility. I make the sacrifice of wading into that ideological cesspool from time to time to see what the other side is up to, but rabble.ca articles probably shouldn't be referred on other than for the purposes of being mocked.

Dawg provided a perfect example of the paranoid delusions and conspiracy-minded craziness of the extremists on the anti-Israel radical left. One tweet from me and  "the spinning blades of the pro-Israel lobby" are at work. And a clarification by Carolyn of her policy position to preclude misinterpretation becomes "self-abasing confessions offered by the victims at Stalin's show trials"   

Wow. And people like Dawg and Zerb wonder why the rest of us think they're nuts.

And by the way, Dawg demonstrated his commitment to free speech and liberalism by banning me from his site after that one and only comment I ever posted on it. Ha!

Someone at The Calgary Herald went off the deep end

How much of a paranoid idiot does someone have to be to think the Prime Minister of Canada is personally intervening to prevent a Ministry of Natural Resources scientist from discussing "a recent study on an ancient flood that swept across northern Canada 13,000 years ago when massive ice dams gave way at the end of the last ice age."?

According to the unnamed writer at the Herald in a column titled Media Chill, " Prime Minister Stephen Harper's reputation as a control freak -- the accusations have flown for years -- were again reinforced this week with the revelation that Canadian scientists with Natural Resources Canada need pre-approval from the minister of natural resources, Christian Paradis, to speak with journalists. Whether this is Harper himself or his chief of staff, Guy Giorno, we can't say, but it is the latest in a line of evidence supporting the accusations of muzzling"

The writer continued with histrionics like, "to micro-manage it to the extent that reporters must submit questions so the expert can deliver government-approved scripted responses, as was the case, is paranoia of Orwellian proportions" and "It's ominously totalitarian."

The only thing ominous about this is the low standards to which the Calgary Herald must hold their editorial staff.

Anyone who has has any government experience knows that only specifically approved spokespeople can speak to the media in an official capacity. For anyone other to do so requires bureaucratic procedures to be followed.

This is not unique to the current government. This is a policy that applies to just about every level of government in every country. Someone should have explained this basic fact to the Herald's anonymous editorialist.

Most large corporations have identical policies. If the Herald had wanted to write about how private industry can deal with this situation more easily (it usually involves a call to your boss and an instant yes or no response)  than the public sector (where a series of calls, emails and approvals are needed), that would be one thing.

But to suggest a conspiracy that goes all the way to the highest elected office in our land suggests paranoia bordering on mental illness.

Is this what the media has come to in this country?

Of course, a clue is how I happened across this little gem of a piece.  tweet-happy Antonia Zerbisias pushed this as confirmation of the evil Harper plan to suppress free speech. Yup, the same Zerb who doesn't quite get that her wish to ban Sun-TV news is a genuine suppression of free speech as opposed to the invented ones by Stephen Harper she babbles incoherently about.