Radio Canada International Arabic Edition

RCI Arabic's flagship program bi la hudud (Without Borders, or Sans Limite in French) is hosted by May Abu-Sa'ab

I recently discovered Radio Canada International's Arabic Edition and have been pleasantly surprised by its content. RCI Arabic has only two anchors, May and Fadi, and does not broadcast 24 hours. Unlike BBC Arabic, it does not aim to be an alternative to pan-Arab news stations and, in contrast to America's Radio Sawa, it makes no attempt to appeal to the lowest-common denominator or to young people. Instead, RCI Arabic's main goal appears to be to inform Arabs outside of Canada, especially potential (educated) immigrants, about Canadian society, the challenges of immigration, and about the place of Arabs and Muslims in the country. Another target audience is probably the Arab population in Canada. Canadian multiculturalism and the integration of immigrants in Canada are themes that come up in almost every show. Having listened to the station for the past week, I sometimes get the impression that the hosts are required to meet certain word quotas in their broadcasts - the ِArabic word for integration (اندماج) comes up every five minutes or so. There are also high-brow programs with Arab Canadian academics and intellectuals and frequent health-related features.

My only criticisms so far concern the lousy music (it's always some mediocre Canadian or Québecois content) and, on a more serious note, the fact that the editors don't use the station to promote Canadian values in the Middle East. Radio Canada International should be using the station as a means to stimulate more balanced discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Arab world. I would also expect RCI Arabic to do stories about human rights and press freedoms or the lack thereof in the Arab Middle East. Until now, when politics were discussed, the few guests that I've heard so far were Arab Canadian academics or community activists who repeat the same pan-Arab, anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric that one could hear on any popular Arab satellite or radio station. Especially irritating was an interview with Naïma Mimoune, a woman of Algerian origin emigrated to Canada in 1998 and is now running for or involved with the separatist Parti Québecois (PQ) in the Quebec provincial elections. Madame Mimoune, who does not appear to be related to Maimonides, justified her support for the PQ by asserting that it was the most sympathetic to Arab immigrants and by referring to its "pro-Arab" position during the war in Lebanon last summer. Both hosts, to their credit, challenged their guest to explain her support for the PQ. I think they went as far as to suggest that Mimoune's immigrant constituency might be deterred by the potentially destabilizing effect of separatist agenda. They also noted that the Quebec Liberal party has a prominent Arab parliamentarian, Madame Fatima Houda-Pepine.

The Home-Grown Terrorists

Nada Farooq

The Globe and Mail in a story titled Hateful chatter behind the veil reports on blogs and online forums run by Nada Farooq and other Muslim Canadian women, discovered by the newspaper. Farooq is the wife of Zakaria Amara, one of the “Toronto 17” arrested in early June (see Anti-Terror Raid in Canada Leads to Arrest of 17 Suspects, and The Motivations of Terror). The posts were made over a 20-month period , mostly in 2004, long before the arrests. The posts of these young women, almost all of whom were raised in Canada, provide a window onto the self-fuelled rage of Islamist extremists in the West. They provide further evidence against the view that such factors as discrimination against Muslims, on the one hand, or American foreign policy, on the other, are primarily responsible for the hatred preached and practiced by Muslim fundamentalists in the east and west.

Most jarring is the posters’ contempt for Canada: “Ms. Farooq's hatred for the country is palpable,” the reporters write,

She hardly ever calls Canada by its name, rather repeatedly referring to it as "this filthy country." It's a sentiment shared by many of her friends, one of whom states that the laws of the country are irrelevant because they are not the laws of God.

In late April of 2004, a poster asks the forum members to share their impressions of what makes Canada unique. Nada's answer is straightforward. "Who cares? We hate Canada."

Farooq rails against democratic institutions and secular governments:

"Are you accepting a system that separates religion and state?" she asks. "Are you gonna [sic] give your pledge of allegiance to a party that puts secular laws above the laws of Allah? Are you gonna [sic] worship that which they worship? Are you going to throw away the most important thing that makes you a muslim [sic]?"

Her views on Jews are hardly surprising:

May Allah crush these jews, [sic] bring them down to their kneees, humuliate [sic] them. Ya Allah make their women widows and their children orphans.

But she is equally intolerant of homosexuals, and of Muslims who do not share her embrace of terrorism and her disdain for Canada and the west. Alongside a photograph of a rally held by a Canadian support group for gay Muslims she writes:

Look at these pathetic people ... They should all be sent to Saudi, where these sickos are executed or crushed by a wall, in public.

All this is combined with the most self-serving paranoia, which insists that Muslims are the perpetual victims of conspiracies and persecution at the hands of non-Muslims:

"You don't know that the Muslims in Canada will never be rounded up and put into internment camps like the Japanese were in WWII!" [another woman] writes in one 2004 post. This is a time when Muslims "are being systematically cleansed from the earth," she adds.

Largest Canuck Union Backs Israel Boycott

Canadian Union Activists have all the answers...
First it was the British academics union, now the real proletarians have jumped on the bandwagon. Yesterday, Ontario's largest public sector union (CUPE - the Canadian Union of Public Employees) voted to support an international campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. According to an article published in the Globe and Mail, delegates to a CUPE convention "voted overwhelmingly Saturday to support the campaign until Israel recognizes the Palestinian right to self-determination." According to the leader of the campaign, Katherine Nastovski, chairwoman of the CUPE Ontario international solidarity committee,

“Boycott, divestment and sanction worked to end apartheid in South Africa [...] We believe the same strategy will work to enforce the rights of Palestinian people, including the right of refugees to return to their homes and properties.”

All of this shallow rhetoric really leaves me wondering how many of these people made an honest effort to reflect and to seek out critical voices before they went on the attack. How many Israeli leaders have to stand up and say that they support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ergo, that they support the Palestinian right to self-determination? Did anyone even take note of Ehud Olmert's statements in Washington? Hell, did anyone listen to Sharon's public suppport in favour of a two-state solution? Barak? Peres? Rabin (z"l)? If anything, it is the Palestinian government, led by Hamas, which until now has refused to recognize the existence of the state of Israel and is formally committed to its destruction, that could be accused of refusing to recognize the Jewish right to self-determination. (By the way, although I agree that covenants as such do not always dictate the political decisions of a movement which are shaped by the context in which it operates, I urge anyone to skim the Hamas Covenant to get at least a sense of where these people are coming from.

The implication that Israel is an apartheid state is also fundamentally flawed. Usually, this claim is based by its authors on the fact that Palestinians cannot freely move between the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Israel proper. Dumb people somehow consider the restrictions on Palestinian entry into Israel as analagous to the South African apartheid system which prohibited black citizens of that country from leaving their townships and going to white areas without special passes, etc. Well, Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza Strip are not Israeli citizens and for the most part have no desire to get Israeli citizenship. Under international law, they are no more entitled to working in Israel proper than a Canadian without a work permit looking for work in the United States. Just as the United States or Canada have the right to control the entry of foreign nationals into their sovereign territory, Israel has the right, in principle, to prevent the movement of Palestinians across its borders, especially when you consider the threat of terror. Take issue with the route of the security fence that is being built by Israel to protect itself, fine. But to call this apartheid??

Apartheid was a doomed attempt by South Africa's white minority to preserve its hold on power by denying the country's black citizens equal access to health care, education and social spaces. In the Israeli-Palestinian case, we have a majority Jewish state living next to a (disfunctional) autonomous Palestinian state-in-formation. It is up to the Palestinian state in formation to provide its citizens with a functioning goverment, economic opportunities, health services and education and it has been doing so, albeit not always successfully, since 1993. The apartheid argument has to be recognized for what it is: a bunch of crap. Plenty of South Africans (not those with an axe to grind with Israel because of its unfortunate decision to have relations with the evil apartheid regime) have already written about the problem of equating Israel and Afrikaaner dominated South Africa. If you want to criticize Israel, at least do so with some semblance of integrity and intellectual honesty.

Maybe the argument is that Israel is pursuing "apartheid policies" towards its Arab citizens? If so, then it is even more ludicrous. If Israel were an apartheid state, would it be investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in special preparatory English classes to prepare Arab Bedouin students for university? Would Israeli Arabs be allowed to go to the same hospitals as Jewish Israelis, be it as patients, nurses or doctors? Let me cite an article published in the Guardian by Benjamin Pogrund, a former South African and the founder of Yakar's Centre for Social Concern in Jerusalem:

[...] health is a visible indicator of the differences between apartheid South Africa and Israel. In South Africa, the infant mortality rate (IMR) in 1985 was 78 per 1,000 live births. Among color groups: whites 12, Asians 20, coloreds 60, blacks 94 to 150. In Israel, in the 1950s, the IMR among Muslims was 60.6 and among Jews 38.8. Major improvements occurred in health care during the 1990s and by 2001 the IMR among Arabs was 7.6 (Muslims 8.2, Christians 2.6, Druze 4.7). Among Jews, 4.1. According to the health ministry, the higher Muslim figure was due mainly to genetic defects as a result of marriages between close relatives; poverty is also a factor. Other countries in 2000: Switzerland, 8.2, and 12.3 for Turks living there; United States, whites 8.5, blacks 21.3.

In short, the status of Israel's Arab citizens is in no way analogous to that of South African blacks. These kinds of claims are no more credible than equations between the present-day United States and apartheid South Africa. If some shitty union wants to protest discrimination against Israeli Arab citizens, then they should go ahead and protest discrimination. But at least try to make the appearance of being fair and protest against discrimination around the world. Go defend Indian and Bangladeshi day labourers in the United Arab Emirates who are denied basic worker's rights and who are prevented from organizing into unions! Start punishing companies that are linked to Saudi Arabia where foreign domestic workers are regularly abused!

Related Links:

Globe and Mail Article reporting the CUPE decision

Full-text of the CUPE Resolution

The Concerned Presbyterians - a group of Presbyterians calling on the Presbyterian Church in the US to STOP its divestment from corporations doing business in Israel