Omar Barghouti is an activist and writer based in Palestine. He was one of the early advocates of a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions strategy against Israel's occupation and apartheid policies. He was one of the headline speakers of Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) 2009. I interviewed him in Toronto on March 2, 2009.
Justin Podur (JP): Perhaps we should start with an outline of the call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), and the demands of the call.
Michael Ignatieff, sometimes described as Canada's "Prime Minister in Waiting", is sometimes falsely accused of justifying torture. He is actually much more sophisticated. He is willing to consider torture, and thinks that people, like him, who are against torture should be honest with themselves that this might be a costly decision. He wrote in Prospect in April 2006.
One of Colombia's major magazines, Cambio, published a story quoting from the magic laptops that survived bombing in the Ecuadorian jungle and were retrieved after the Colombian government assassinated Raul Reyes just about a year ago (March 3/08). This particular story concerns my friends Hollman Morris and Manuel Rozental.
On February 20, the Federal Court of Canada dropped most of the conditions it had placed on one of the prisoners of its “security certificate” regime, Adil Charkaoui. While much of his life is still lived in the rights-free zone widened under the “war on terror”, his struggles over the years have won him back some parts of his life. (For the decision see here)
Indigenous people in Colombia are fighting their perpetual struggle against the militarization of their communities. In a horrific incident earlier in February, Colombia's guerrillas (the FARC) massacred dozens of Awa indigenous people in Narino. FARC claimed the massacre was a reprisal for Awa's cooperation with the military, who came earlier and coerced some people to cooperate with them.
Like any sensible person seeking to escape the Toronto winter, I decided to spend a few days in Winnipeg! Last time I was in Winnipeg was 2002, and the fall, and I told my hosts in the marvelous activist community out there that I wanted to return in the winter and experience the legendary -20 to -30 C or colder. For better or worse, this trip, thanks to global warming or natural variability, it was a positively balmy -5 C, not much colder than Toronto.
Numerous analysts have said that "Israel will not allow a full-blown humanitarian crisis in Gaza". First of all, I am not sure how they would define a "full-blown" crisis. Can the current crisis reach "half-blown" status at least? The place is rubble. Sanitation, electricity, and drinking water facilities are destroyed. Hospitals are destroyed. The systems were brought to the breaking point by blockade and then pushed over the cliff by systematic destruction. If people are starving, how would anyone know?
Whatever the value of this path that I'm on, wherever it leads, Subcomandante Marcos's words were a major part of putting me on it. The Chiapas of the Zapatistas is one of the first places I visited and reported from and worked in and it was not that long a two years from Chiapas to Palestine (my first trip to Colombia in between).
If national media help make a nation, then we all need to stop reading and listening to conventional Canadian media if we want to make a decent Canada. Benedict Anderson, perhaps the leading scholar of nationalism, wrote that the daily newspaper (along with other innovations like novels, maps, censuses, museums) played a key role in creating national consciousness. People in a country like Canada use their own media - public (CBC) and private (CanWest, TorStar, CTVglobemedia) - to know what is happening in their own country. Media are also an important part of forging a national identity.
