Canadian Apartheid Week

"Israeli Apartheid Week" is drawing to a close. It's a controversial event. Defenders of Israel's policies towards the Palestinians would say that if you can't detect the nuances between Israel's treatment of the Palestinians (theft of land, imprisoning them in barren prisons, etc.) and South African Apartheid (theft of land, relocating the native majority to barren "homelands," pass-laws, etc.), well you're half-an-inch away from wanting to strip Jewish children naked, gassing them to death and making soap and lampshades out of them.

[Which, by the way, is why less and less people take these racist apologists for imperialism seriously anymore.]

Canadian activists have created this week to call attention to the abominable practices of our ally, our free trade partner, the recipient of billions of dollars of U.S. aid annually, this representative of Western democratic values in a strategic part of the world. At the same time, we don't appear to have a "Canadian Apartheid Week." After all, we've locked the native population up on uneconomic reserves and starved them for resources and ignore their land-claims and resource rights in an effort to force them to surrender their separate status and all their claims to any of the wealth in these lands in the same way that the Israelis are trying to compel the Palestinians to give up on their homeland and give up on the Occupied Territories and wander off to Jordan, Egypt or anywhere else.

I'm not really faulting Canadian progressives here. A lot of them do focus on our abuse of the First Nations. What I was musing on this morning was the attitudes towards the First Nations on the part of the Canadian population in general and how that compares to Israeli attitudes towards the Palestinians.

Depressingly, a significant minority of Canadians are so racist and insecure about First Nations that they're willing to endorse murderous policies towards them whenever there's an incident of First Nations activism. In Caledonia, on the second day of a land-occupation by Six Nations activists, racist Ontarians were calling for the police or the military to forcibly remove the "Indians" from the site, this in spite of the fact that there was an ongoing public inquiry into the murder of Dudley George who was trying to get back his people's land FIFTY YEARS after it was stolen and after as many years of peaceful petitioning, prompting the premier to scream "Get the fucking Indians out of the park!" If First Nations were lobbing rockets at Canadians or setting off bombs, I don't think it's out of the question that there would be the same murderous racism in Canada that befouls the Israeli body-politic to the point of the bulk of the population cheers on the massive aerial bombardment of civilian slums.

The Israelis abuse the Palestinians on a daily basis and (in a tit-for-tat process that's been ongoing since the Zionist movement first started claiming the land in the 1920's) attack and kill them from time to time and then bemoan the Palestinians' "anti-Israel" attitude and their "culture of hate." Canadians abandon the First Nations on remote, underserviced reserves, split up families, sexually abused them, broke treaties, starved them, destroyed their culture, divided and conquered their political leadership, and now we call them dirty, drunk, lazy and bemoan their failure to surrender all elements of themselves as a people and embrace us (though we'd rather not have to touch them, or hire them, or you know, anything like that) and when they occasionally rise-up and peacefully protest, we shriek in rage.

"Canada Apartheid Week" wouldn't be very popular in this racist country. That's why it's necessary.